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Theses and Dissertations
2012
Inherently undesirable : American identity and the
role of negative eugenics in the education of
visually impaired and blind students in Ohio,
1870-1930
Jennifer L. Free
The University of Toledo
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Free, Jennifer L., "Inherently undesirable : American identity and the role of negative eugenics in the education of visually impaired
and blind students in Ohio, 1870-1930" (2012). Theses and Dissertations. 314.
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A Dissertation
entitled
Inherently Undesirable: American Identity and the Role of Negative Eugenics in the
Education of Visually Impaired and Blind Students in Ohio, 1870-1930
by
Jennifer L. Free, J.D.
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
Doctor of Philosophy Degree in History
_________________________________________
Dr. Diane F. Britton, Committee Chair
_________________________________________
Dr. Peter Linebaugh, Committee Member
_________________________________________
Dr. Jesse Britton, Committee Member
_________________________________________
Dr. Jim Ferris, Committee Member
_________________________________________
Dr. Patricia R. Komuniecki, Dean
College of Graduate Studies
The University of Toledo
December 2012
Copyright 2012, Jennifer L. Free
This document is copyrighted material. Under copyright law, no parts of this document
may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author.
An Abstract of
Inherently Undesirable: American Identity and the Role of Negative Eugenics in the
Education of Visually Impaired and Blind Students in Ohio, 1870-1930
by
Jennifer L. Free
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
Doctor of Philosophy Degree in History
The University of Toledo
December 2012
To date, studies of eugenics artificially confine their focus to the movement’s
application to race, socio-economic status, and the forced sterilization of the so-called
feebleminded. However, the segregationist aspect of the eugenics design in the United
States brought with it damaging policies toward individuals with physical and mental
disabilities. The impact of the broad scale subscription to eugenic rhetoric and practice
as applied to marginalized social groups was evident in all facets of society. It was,
however, particularly revealing when one undertakes an analysis of the movement’s
application to the evolution of the special education system in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Separation of disabled students, whether in the form of outright
exclusion in the residential state schools, or segregation in isolated sight-saving
classrooms in the common schools, was one of the strongest illustrations of negative
eugenics. It implicated a classification and sorting system that utilized economic
productivity as an assertedly objective measure of value and desirability. This scheme
iii
allowed for differentiation between the deserving and the undeserving in the extension of
the full rights and benefits of U.S. citizenship during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
The end of a desirable citizenry was achieved through the outright exclusion of
students with disabilities, and later through segregated classrooms in the common schools
following states’ enactment of compulsory attendance statutes. Like other states, Ohio
did not eliminate its exclusionary practices with its shift to segregated sight-saving
classes. It shifted the form to intra-district segregation. Special education
institutionalized the idea of the “undesirable” student. Segregated classrooms provided a
vehicle to continue the tracking system that predetermined which students were likely to
mature into valuable contributors to the expanding industrial state, and therefore desirable
and deserving of the full rights and benefits of U.S. citizenship. By utilizing back-door
arrangements to segregate undesirable students, administrators and teachers aimed to
preserve traditional notions of order and efficiency in the common schools. The
establishment and evolution of segregated sight-saving classes ensured that students who
were believed to be incapable of becoming productive, and therefore valuable and
desirable citizens due to their status as visually impaired or blind would remain on a
separate track. By establishing special education classes, school districts appeared to
embrace the progressive measure of deinstitutionalization, and at the same time ensured
the continued viability of the status of undesirability, and allowed teachers to promote the
progressive ideals of order and efficiency.
iv
“I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the
scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them.
We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me,
a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.” – Chris Cleave, Little Bee
(2010).
Contents
Abstract
iii
Contents
vi
1 Introduction
1
2 Eugenics: The History and Ideology of a Pseudo-Science and Its Parallels to
Progressive Reform
32
3 Educational Reforms as Applied to the General Education System During the Late
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
77
4 Evolution of the Special Education System: The Ohio State School for the Blind and
Sight-Saving Classes in Urban School Districts
120
5 Conclusion: Identity and the Role of Periodization
148
Bibliography
178
vi
Chapter 1
Introduction
Between 1870 and 1930, negative eugenics played a significant role in defining
people characterized as inherently undesirable because they were physically or
developmentally disabled. Twentieth century studies of eugenics artificially confined
their focus to the movement’s application to race, socio-economic status, and forced
sterilization of the feebleminded, or persons believed to of a lower intellectual caliber.
However, the segregationist aspect of the eugenics design in the U.S. brought with it
damaging policies toward individuals with physical and mental disabilities. The impact
of the broad scale subscription to negative eugenic rhetoric and practice as applied to this
historically marginalized group was evident in all facets of society. It was, however,
particularly instructive when one undertakes an analysis of the movement’s application to
the development of the special education system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Separation of disabled students, whether in the form of outright exclusion in
the residential state schools, or segregation in isolated classrooms in the common schools
was one of the strongest illustrations of the eugenics design.
This dissertation analyzes the special education system as a vehicle of negative
eugenics as applied to visually impaired and blind students at the Ohio State School for
the Blind (OSSB) and in segregated sight-saving classes in urban school districts.
1
Administrators and teachers forcibly segregated visually impaired and blind students in
an effort to preserve the progressive ideals of order and efficiency following Ohio’s
enactment of its compulsory attendance statute in 1877. This resulted in a dual track
education system in which students with disabilities were denied the training necessary to
become self-sufficient, economically productive, and therefore desirable citizens as
adults.
The fourteenth amendment’s substantive and procedural safeguards as delineated
by federal statutes and case law bestow the rights and duties of U.S. citizenship on all
persons in the country. 1 Citizenship status affords a person the protections of substantive
and procedural due process and equal protection of the laws. To fulfill the civic duties
inextricably tied to citizenship, one must receive an education substantively equal to that
of their peers. In Brown v. Board of Education, 2 a landmark decision ending de jur
segregation of racial minorities in public schools, the Supreme Court disavowed its 1896
holding in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate facilities satisfied the equal protection clause
provided they were equal. 3 In finding that Plessy was at odds with the amendment both
on its face and as applied, the Court reasoned that separate schools were, by definition
“inherently unequal.” 4 The Court went on to explain the connection between education
and a viable, socially and economically productive citizenry. As Chief Justice Earl
Warren observed in his majority opinion;
1
U.S. Const. amend. XIV, S. 1-2.
2
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
3
Plessy v. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
4
Brown, 485.
2
[t]oday, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local
governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for
education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our
democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public
responsibilities . . . .it is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a
principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him
for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his
environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be
expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. 5
The Court’s deference to the fundamental importance of education in Brown was
not unique in American jurisprudence. The Court has repeatedly stressed the inescapable
nexus between education and productive, and therefore valuable and desirable adult
citizens. 6 Although the questions presented in these cases usually centered on issues of
race or national origin, the tie between education and citizenship cannot be so confined.
Like African American, Native American, and Asian American students, when students
5
Ibid., 484.
6
Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 400 (1923), noting that we have “always regarded education
and [the] acquisition of knowledge as matters of supreme importance”); Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205,
221 (1972), explaining that education is “necessary to prepare citizens to participate effectively and
intelligently in . . . [the United State’s] open political system if we are to preserve freedom and
independence”; Brown, 493 (1954), noting that “education is perhaps the most important function of state
and local governments . . . It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument
in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping
him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be
expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.”; Pyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202,
222 n.20 (1982), noting that education is an “important socializing institution” that serves to “impart . . .
those shared values through which social order and stability are maintained”; San Antonio Indep. Sch. Dist.
v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 35 (1973), although the Court refused to find a fundamental right to education, it
stressed the importance of education and noted that “education is not merely some governmental ‘benefit’
indistinguishable from other forms of social welfare legislation.” Significantly, the Court found that,
because education is so important, even undocumented aliens should not be deprived of an educational
opportunity; Erwin Chemerinsky, Constitutional Law: Principles and Policies (New York: Aspen Law and
Business, 2002), 888-89, discussing the importance of the Court’s pro-education decisions.
3
with disabilities were segregated from their peers they received a substandard, and
consequently unequal education. As a result, they were denied the requisite training
necessary to become valuable citizens as determined by economic contribution and
productivity.
Despite the Fourteenth Amendment’s unambiguous charge, the benefits of U.S.
citizenship were systematically denied to specified identity categories. Historians of race
and gender have long explored the ways in which de jure and de facto barriers to full
citizenship have developed, and ultimately how the resulting deprivations affected these
marginalized groups. Beginning with the emergence of disability studies programs in the
mid-1980s, scholars sought to examine the role of societal institutions as applied to
persons with disabilities. More importantly, scholars of disability studies, and later
disability history undertook to analyze the unique history of each sub-category of
disability by identifying and acknowledging the personal agency of each identity group.
In recent decades, historians have begun to study and recognize the personal agency of
many socially marginalized groups. Disability history as a distinct subcategory emerged
relatively late and continues to lag behind other areas of social history. 7
As Katherine Kudlick explained in her 2003 work “Why We Need Another
Other,” dating from the mid-1980s, scholars of anthropology and literature have studied
the role and function of disability in U.S. society. They were among the first to view
disability as a historical subject capable of analysis. Notably, the fields that paved the
way for isolating the histories of race, sexuality, and gender introduced postmodernism
7
Catherine J. Kudlick, “Why We Need Another Other,” The American Historical Review 108, no.
3 (2003): 764-66.
4
and linguistic modes of analysis that offer valuable paradigms and tools for examining
disability as a unique social category. 8 As disability historian Douglass C. Baynton
observed in his 2001 work “Disability and the Justification for Inequality in American
History,” “[j]ust as gender and race have impact beyond women and blacks, so too will
disability as we explore it in its full social, political, economic, moral, scientific, cultural,
legal, philosophical, and medical dimensions. It will force historians to reconsider what
they thought they knew and took for granted.” 9 Historians were late in explicitly
undertaking disability history as a separate scholarly endeavor. As Kudlick observed,
some had unwittingly studied it for decades, while others studied it without labeling it.
Other historians were inspired by related disciplines and were more inclined to
characterize their work as disability history. The result is an untraversed ground ripe for
inquiry and analysis that may be definitive in restructuring the traditional narrative.
The prevailing view among disability historians is that disability is a crucial
defining social category in itself. In other words, like race and gender, disability is a
social construct. It is not an isolated, individual medical pathology in need of correction
or cure. Disability studies, and consequently disability history emphasizes the meaning
that we attribute to differences in outward appearances, behavior, “functioning sensory
acuity,” and intellectual ability. Here, the focus is not on the differences themselves, but
rather on society’s interpretation of and reaction to those differences.
8
Ibid.,763-65.
9
Douglass C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification for 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), 207.
5
In her 1998 book Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, Simi Linton
defined disability history as an “interdisciplinary field based on a socio-political analysis
of disability and informed both by the knowledge base and methodologies used in the
traditional liberal arts, and by conceptualizations and approaches developed in areas of
the new scholarship.” 10 Like Kudlick, Linton viewed disability as a socially constructed
category as opposed to isolated afflictions in need of medical treatment or cure. Viewed
as a social construct, and particularly relevant to a discussion of the intersect of disability
and eugenics, disability is central to an understanding of how the western world
constructed and maintained hierarchies and preserved social order as well as how it
measured progress and productivity. 11
Social hierarchies were dependent on the persistent threat of disability. This,
according to Linton, was evident in the metaphors that implicate disability. For centuries,
those in power had maintained it by invoking metaphors that had the effect of
dehumanizing and further marginalizing certain classes of individuals. In the end, those
who were the initial victims of social control molded and used these articulations and
interpretations, with their implicit threat of incapacity, to secure power. The oppressed,
in turn, adopted negative attitudes toward disability in an effort to counter the
characterization. 12
10
Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York University
Press, 1998), 24.
11
Ibid., 94-95.
12
Ibid.
6
Disability itself was a historically marginalized identity category. However, no
other socially marginalized group wanted to align itself with the disabled. In a similar
vein, and of particular importance here was the role of that disability played as a critique
of the “social body.” As Linton observed, this dynamic was especially effective because
philosophers and political theorists like Aristotle had already solidified the image of a
perfect body. He identified imperfect bodies, primarily women, but also anyone who did
not resemble their parents as “deformed,” “mutilated,” “deviant,” “monstrous.” These
are all, as Linton pointed out, synonyms for contemporary understandings and
explanations of disability. 13
In a similar vein, Baynton pointed out that those opposing suffrage, abolition, and
immigration all invoked the charge of disability as a sword to discredit “undesirable”
groups’ claims to citizenship. For their part, women, African Americans, and immigrants
were often extremely vocal about being analogized to individuals with disabilities. The
centrality of this dynamic to U.S. history was undeniable. By analogizing any socially
marginalized group to the disabled, the ruling class succeeded in creating an attitude of
disdain for the latter group. This interplay between power and its inherent component of
differentiation and segregation allowed the eugenics movement to thrive in the U.S. 14
As evidence of the centrality of the dynamic between power, identity, and
representation in the context of disability in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,
historians have examined the freak shows of the late nineteenth century. They drew on
13
Ibid., 93-94.
14
Baynton, “Disability and the Justification for Inequality in American History,” 35-41.
7
the “freak” exhibitions to analyze public perceptions about desirability and acceptability.
For example in his 1977 book, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self, literary
Leslie Fiedler offered a survey of the social responses to physical abnormality. By
analyzing the fluid nature of physical and symbolic boundaries and the ways in which
“freaks” preyed on popular insecurities regarding sexuality, individuality, representation,
human nature, and life and death, Fiedler went far in explaining the widespread
popularity of these mass exposes. 15
In contrast, historian Robert Bogdan’s 1988 book, Freak Show: Presenting
Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit, argued that the “freak” was wholly a social
construction. He invoked the status of disability as a social construct to demonstrate that
it was actually the audience that got “doped.” 16 To him, it was the people who flocked to
the shows in masses, paid money, and believed what they saw who were ultimately
exploited. The freak show developed as a means of profit for the “freaks”---the
entertainers. As seen from the point of view of the “freaks,” it was a staged performance.
They viewed themselves as self-sufficient, proud entertainers. As Bogdan accurately
noted, the freak shows declined before the emergence of prominent disability rights
advocates and the “medicalization” of disability. 17
Historically, individuals with disabilities were subject to a host of misconceptions
and unfounded prejudices. However, people who were visually impaired or blind were
15
Leslie A. Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1977), 41-53.
16
Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988), 23-27.
17
Ibid., 36-48.
8
met with a higher level of preconceived ideas about their abilities and functional
limitations which in turn resulted in a heightened degree of stigmatization and
misunderstanding. In addition to the sweeping characterizations often applied to
individuals with disabilities, blind people were met with fear. 18 The sighted individual
feared that they too will become blind. Many viewed “be[ing] dead” as preferable to
being blind. As one commentator found, sighted persons “often behave as though
blindness is a contagious disease that will jump from one person to another like microbes
or germs.” This avoidance principle even extended to the way we spoke about blind
people. For example, many people refused to discuss blindness at all, and when they
were forced to, they employed such terms as “sightless,” or “non-seeing.” 19
The stigma attached to blind and visually impaired individuals permeated all
aspects of society--from social status, to employment, to education. The prevailing view
of the “helpless blind” held that friends and relatives “had better be prepared to drop
everything to act as chauffeur to the blind person.” 20 Significantly, “no one really
expected a blind employee to carry his or her full share of the load.” Most importantly,
“no one actually expected blind children to keep up academically and socially with their
sighted peers.” 21 At the beginning of the twentieth century, most people realized that
voicing these ideas would offend general contentions of decency and early ideas of
political correctness, but most believed them. Not only did people embrace these views,
18
Michael E. Monbeck,, The Meaning of Blindness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
19
Ibid., 5.
20
Ruby Ryles, “Introduction: Is Your Child Appropriate?” Braille Monitor 35 (Nov. 1992).
21
Ibid.
1973), 4.
9
they allowed them to prescribe the structure and function of the residential state schools
and later the segregated classes in urban school districts. In the opening decades of the
twentieth century, the explicit language and accompanying rhetoric became more benign
and benevolent on its face. However, the underlying social interpretations,
classifications, and characterizations that resulted in the marginalization of visually
impaired and blind students did not give way to reflect the reform-oriented speeches and
writings that highlighted the social value of full integration.
Like the histories of race and gender, disability history was characterized and
tainted by outright exclusion and later segregation. This was especially apparent in the
context of education of disabled students in the U.S. In the early nineteenth century,
charitable organizations established institutions to warehouse so-called “defective”
persons. In general, early residential facilities were not within the province of the states’
duties or control. By the end of the nineteenth century, institutions, no longer viewed as
philanthropic endeavors, were largely replaced by segregated special education classes in
the common schools. 22 One view of students with disabilities conceptualized and
delineated the chronology as a homogeneous linear progression. This, in turn suggested a
steady movement toward total inclusion that ended in self-sufficiency and full societal
participation in the adult years. Viewed this way, special education served to mold
undesirable children into valuable economic contributors, and consequently deserving of
the full benefits of citizenship rights. 23
22
Margaret A. Winzer, The History of Special Education: From Isolation to Integration
(Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1993), 313-331.
23
John Barnard and David Burner ed., The American Experience in Education (New York: New
Viewpoints, 1975), 121.
10
During the eighteenth and through the major part of the nineteenth centuries,
students with disabilities were kept at home while non-disabled students of comparable
ages attended school. 24 Beginning in the late 1800s, students with disabilities began to
attend school. Initially, they were automatically sent to the state school that specialized
in their particular disability. Later, these students were allowed to attend public schools,
but they were kept hidden away in special education classes where actual academic
instruction was often lacking. 25 Formal segregation of exceptional students reflected the
popular belief among educators that inclusion would place undue “stress on the teacher
and other students.” 26 By asserting the “undue stress” argument, administrators and
teachers succeeded in furthering segregationist-oriented policies. The contemporary
jurisprudence legitimized and institutionalized these views. 27
School districts continued to formally segregate disabled students in the decades
that followed. However, the asserted justifications became more benign. Advocates of
segregation now argued that inclusion would place excessive “stress” on the disabled
student him or herself. 28 This period also marked the beginning of an effort to give
24
Daniel H. Melvin, “The Desegregation of Children With Disabilities,” DePaul Law Review vol.
44, 599, 603 (1995); See also, H.R. Rep. No. 94-332, at 2(1975), citing the early history of disabled
students.
25
Julie K. Underwood and Julie F. Mead, Legal Aspects of Special Education and Pupil Services
(Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995), 57.
26
Ibid., 14.
27
Watson v. City of Cambridge, 32 N.E. 864, 864 (Mass. 1893), affirming the school board’s
determination that a child was too feeble-minded to be educated; State ex rel. Beattie v. Board of Education
172 N.W.153, 155 (Wis. 1919), upholding the school board’s refusal to let a student with partial paralysis
and a speech impairment attend the public school. In holding that the child was unfit to attend school, the
court reasoned that the student’s attendance would be damaging to the academic and nonacademic pursuits
of the institution.
28
Laura F. Rothstein, Special Education Law (White Plains, N.Y.: Longman, 1990), 56-61.
11
disabled students some type of education. Initially, this effort manifested itself in the
form of “diluted academic training.” Eventually, this watered-down-curriculum approach
transformed into basic skills programs. Undoubtedly, the education of disabled students
was an attempt to categorize them without regard to their physical or intellectual
differences. By the 1950s, society began to recognize that people with disabilities could
develop as unique individuals. It now acknowledged the “worth and dignity” of this
group. This recognition led to a new goal for schools: to teach disabled students to
become “self-relian[t].” 29 Despite the fact that society now claimed to value each
student as a unique person capable of achieving individual autonomy, students with
disabilities were still segregated from their peers. 30
Students who were hearing impaired or deaf were the first among children with
disabilities to receive any type of formal education, and consequently the first to receive
serious attention in scholarly discourse. Modeled after the National Institute for the Deaf
in Paris, France, the Connecticut Asylum for the Education of Deaf and Dumb Persons
opened its doors in 1817. 31 Under the direction of Thomas H. Gallaudet and Laurent
Clerc, the School provided students with academic and vocational training. In its
infancy, the School utilized a modified version of the French system of manual signing.
Eventually, American Sign Language (ASL) replaced the earlier approach and served as
the generally accepted standard. The heated debate between the “oralists” and the
214.
29
Ibid., 91.
30
Ibid.
31
Harlan Lane, When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf (New York: Random House, 1984),
12
“mannualists” was at its height at the turn of the century. 32 That debate is, however,
beyond the scope of this study.
In 1832, leading nineteenth-century reformer Samuel Gridley Howe established
the renowned Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts in. 33 Later, he successfully
petitioned several state legislatures to appropriate funds for residential schools for
students who were blind. Notably, Howe endorsed many of Horace Mann’s reform
efforts of the general education curriculum and later vehemently opposed the institutional
system for blind students, arguing instead for the benefits of segregated special education
classes within the state-supported common schools. 34
This shift in the intellectual current began around 1900 when the common schools
in Chicago, Illinois established segregated special education classes for students who
were visually impaired or blind. These students were isolated in separate classes and had
little interaction with their sighted peers. Although cities in Ohio and Massachusetts
adopted the Chicago Plan an appreciable shift from residential schools to special
education classes was not complete until around the 1970s. By the 1970s, the trend
weighed heavily in favor of partial or total integration with students with disabilities
joining their comparably situated non-disabled peers in the classroom. Even with the
general acceptance of integration in law and policy, most states continued to operate a
32
Douglass C. Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against American
Sign Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 14-23.
33
Perkins Institution for the Blind, Annual Report of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution and the
Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind to the Corporation (Cambridge: 1866), 2-5.
34
Donald F. Moores, Educating the Deaf: Psychology, Principles, and Practices (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 56-64.
13
dual-track system, residential schools for students with physical and/or developmental
disabilities and inclusion to some extent in the common schools. 35
Although the trend of removing deaf and blind students from the state institutions
and placing them instead in segregated special education classes in the common schools
was likely motivated in part by a desire to foster their well-being, the segregationist
aspect of eugenic ideology played a far greater role. The significance of the residential
schools, and later of the segregated special education classes lies not in the nature of the
academic and vocational skills taught, but rather in the fact that they existed at all. Some
contemporary theorists believed that by removing these students from the confines of the
institutions they would have less of an opportunity to marry other deaf or blind
individuals, and pass on the “defect” to their offspring. 36 With the increasing popularity
of psychometric testing many states enacted laws, and local school districts adopted
policies to prohibit children believed to be “incapable of benefiting from education” from
attending school. 37 In the end, this furthered one of the core tenets of the eugenic design;
it kept “defective” children away from one another so there was little chance that they
would create “defective” offspring who would, like their parents, be of no value to a
rapidly industrializing nation, and thus undeserving of the full benefits of U.S.
citizenship.
35
Winzer, History of Special Education, 332-371.
36
Henry H. Goddard, School Training of Defective Children (New York: World Book Co., 1914),
37
Ohio Complied Statutes, vol. 4, p. 329 (1940).
27.
14
At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries the
social, political, and economic climate was informed and directed by advances in
scientific progress, the preference for rational planning, order, and efficiency.
Developments in higher education thrust professional scientists and other theorists to a
prominent position in American thought. Because it was endorsed by many of the
leading experts of the day, the eugenics movement held sway in the United States for
over half a century. 38
During this period of rapid industrialization, shift in immigrants’ countries of
origin, and demographic shifts from rural to urban areas, the intellectual current tended
toward an endorsement of scientific answers to society’s social ills. 39 The publication of
Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking work, On the Origin of Species in 1859 was
instrumental in solidifying the centrality and perceived necessity of science-backed
explanations for occurrences that were once thought to be solely the product of Divine
intervention. 40 Coined by Sir Francis Galton in 1883 in his book, Inquiries into Human
Faculty and Its Development, the term “eugenics” took on multiple meanings and varied
widely in its practical application to socially marginalized groups. 41
38
Winzer, History of Special Education, 337.
39
Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 112.
40
Winzer, History of Special Education, 332.
41
Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London: J. M. Dent, 1883),
3.
15
As evidenced by Darwin’s work, Galton was not the first to suggest that just as
nature “weeds out the unfit” among the animal population, human society should also
“weed out” its unfit members of the community. According to Galton, humans disrupted
the evolutionary process by saving the weak, ill, and disabled through social welfare
programs, insane asylums, and educational institutions. 42 For Darwin and Galton, the
population would, if uninhibited by charitable and state institutions, self-correct and
ultimately perfect itself.
In their traditional formulation, Darwin’s and Galton’s ideas increased in
popularity and assumed a position of primacy among contemporary theorists, attracting
many who believed that there was a “natural” method to achieve a utopian societal
order. 43 Here, humans would be inherently kind, honest, courageous, and intelligent.
Crime, poverty, and physical and mental ailments could be in effect bred out and
eradicated from society. In a similar vein, states plagued by social unrest as a result of
rapid urbanization could utilize eugenics as a means to deal with their ills. Once
Mendelian genetic theory was generally accepted by scientists of the day, eugenicists
capitalized on the notion that behavioral characteristics--such as propensity toward crime
and poverty--could be attributed to hereditary traits. Accordingly, the only way to ensure
that the undesirable trait would not present in the next generation was to “encourage”
42
Ibid., 13-21.
43
Henry H. Goddard, School Training of Defective Children (New York: World Book Co., 1914);
Henry H. Goddard, “Mental Tests and the Immigrant,” Journal of Delinquency 2, no. 5 (1917), 243-277;
Harry Hamilton Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (Chicago: Psychopathic Laboratory
of the Municipal Court of Chicago, 1922); Harry Hamilton Laughlin, “Survey of Eugenical Work in
America,” International Federation of Eugenical Organizations, Report of the Third International
Congress of Eugenics (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: American Eugenics Society, 1930).
16
only those individuals who possessed mentally and physically desirable characteristics to
reproduce. 44
However, eugenics was, by nature, a heterogeneous concept. Due to its malleable
nature it was not amenable to a single uniform definition or analytical construct. Galton
himself defined the concept in multiple ways. In one formulation he expressed it as, “the
study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality
of future generations.” 45 In another instance he described eugenics as, “the science which
deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that
develop them to the utmost advantage.” 46 As historian Mark Haller explained, in the
broadest sense, the eugenics movement aligned itself with a desire to control differential
birth rates as a means to achieve a society characterized by a large proportion of
“desirables,” and a marked decrease in, or outright eradication of “undesirable”
attributes. 47 Haller’s articulation of the eugenics design in the U.S. was deceivingly
narrow in its scope and grossly under-inclusive. This conceptualization of the movement
as a whole was typical of the narrow scope and artificially restricted reach of traditional
studies.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the idea of perfecting
society through scientific means was so prevalent that nearly every country adopted its
44
Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1984), 124.
45
Galton, Inquiries, 2.
46
Ibid., 3-4.
47
Haller, Eugenics, 4.
17
own version of a eugenics policy. The key point of divergence was whether it elected a
policy informed by positive or negative eugenics. Positive eugenics, on the one hand,
promoted the increase of desirable characteristics in a society. Conversely, negative
eugenics sought to decrease the incidence of undesirable traits. 48 In the broadest sense,
countries like the U.S. that adopted the latter strand of eugenic theory utilized it to further
existing coercive practices and to solidify race and/or class-based prejudices. 49
Traditional studies of eugenics have been directed primarily if not exclusively to issues of
race, socio-economic status, and the forced sterilization of the “feebleminded.” By
restricting the scope of their analysis, these early studies have provided only part of a
much broader history. These studies necessarily neglect the segregationist prong of the
eugenics design, and consequently fail to explain the role of residential state schools and
segregated special education classes in urban school districts in perpetuating the agenda.
Special education in rural areas was almost nonexistent. In the mid to late
nineteenth century, few farm families had the economic ability or the interest in sending
their children to the residential state schools. 50 After states enacted compulsory
attendance statutes, most rural districts lacked the fiscal means or the ambition to
establish special education classes. 51 For the first 10-20 years, most districts exempted
themselves from the laws. A focus on the OSSB and the urban school districts allows the
greatest opportunity to use disability as a lens through which to analyze the role of the
48
Winzer, History of Special Education, 343-347.
49
Haller, Eugenics, 14-23.
50
Winzer, History of Special Education, 111.
51
Ibid.
18
segregationist element of eugenic thought in the evolution of special education as applied
to students who were visually impaired or blind.
In its broadest sense, eugenics was understood as a means to apply scientific
knowledge to perceived social ills of the period. Eugenics was in line with dominant
progressive ideology and its emphasis on efficiency, order, rational management, and
improvement of the races. But these eugenic-oriented policies targeted marginalized
groups and were inherently oppressive and paternalistic. 52 Various socially and
economically marginalized groups were singled out and labeled as “undesirable,” and
“inadequate.” As the argument ran, these individuals were most likely to become social
and financial burdens to society. 53 However, the fluid constructions and labels of
“undesirable,” “inadequate,” “unfit,” and their underlying justifications were rarely
interrogated from a critical perspective. The centrality of the role of eugenics and its
segregationist component in informing and driving the evolution of special education
policies as applied to visually impaired and blind students has not been subjected to a
rigorous, exacting analysis.
Historically, eugenics was conceptualized as a largely homogeneous movement
and was studied primarily in the context of race relations in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Many of the early works were highly general in their focus and
approach. For example, in his 1963 monograph, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in
American Thought, Haller offered a broad, but arguably shallow overview of the eugenics
52
Mark A. Largent, Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 78-86.
53
Ibid., 16-24.
19
movement in the U.S. He pointed out that the movement may be traced directly to
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and to the genetic studies of the period. 54 In
analyzing the motivations and pressures underlying the eugenics movement, Haller relied
on religious, political, sociological, and biological sources. His secondary argument that
those in power arrived at conclusions and then manipulated the evidence to support them
was more persuasive and useful. The eugenics movement was a gross misuse of a
potentially notable branch of science directed toward an end of strengthening ultraconservative political ideologies. As Haller succinctly observed, “[b]efore World War I,
those whose political leanings were mostly reactionary and racist were most willing to
accept hereditarian views, and those with a preference for reform and greater sympathy
for democratic bases were most critical in the interpretations that led to the extermination
of undesirables.” 55 Haller, like the majority of his contemporaries, neglected any
analysis of the role of disability itself and of persons with disabilities in the eugenics
movement.
Similarly, Susan E. Lederer’s 1995 work, Subjected to Science: Human
Experimentation in America Before the Second World War focused on specific practices
of medical experimentation. 56 Her work was novel in that she asserted a connection
between the eugenics movement and the women’s rights movement. Because many
women were denied control of their reproductive rights by eugenicists, she argued that
54
Haller, Eugenics, 3-7.
55
Ibid., 116.
56
Susan E. Lederer, Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America Before the Second
World War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 1-3.
20
they were more able to band together and effect mass change. 57 Although Lederer
demonstrated that a lot of unauthorized experiments were performed on “weak”
individuals, she too neglected a direct analysis of the relationship between disability and
eugenics.
As a review of the existing literature reveals, the centrality of disability was often
minimized or completely omitted by scholars. As disability is used as a distinct
analytical category, the traditional histories of the eugenics movement become too
narrow and under-inclusive. Eugenics theory is heterogeneous and is not amenable to a
uniform, singular mode of analysis. To fully understand the movement, scholars must
study it using a variety of lenses. A serious consideration of disability, its sub-categories,
and its social constructions, changes the history of eugenics dramatically as it necessarily
becomes more nuanced. Utilizing disability as the analytical construct to examine the
movement exposes eugenics’ central focus on conceptualizing social problems in medical
terms.
Disability historians and related scholars who have published in the area of
eugenics focused almost exclusively on the “feebleminded,” and to a lesser degree, the
deaf. Also, there is an appreciable amount of scholarship concerning the involuntary
sterilization of the “feebleminded.” Much of this work proved highly influential in
challenging former constructions of disability, and in demonstrating that sterilization was
often used for political reasons. As law professor and historian Paul A. Lombardo
revealed in his groundbreaking 2008 book, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics,
the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell, Carrie Buck, deemed “feeble-minded” in the 1920s,
57
Ibid., 43-61.
21
was in fact a self-sufficient adult of average intelligence. 58 In his fact-based narrative of
the 1927 landmark decision in Buck v. Bell in which the Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s
compulsory sterilization law, Lombardo successfully argued that Buck’s pregnancy was
the result of incest that left her vulnerable in the hands of eugenics activists. As the
author demonstrated, Buck’s attorneys believed the law was in the best interest of
society, and therefore deliberately afforded her an insufficient defense. 59 Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes’ majority opinion in Buck is instructive on contemporary views of
disabled persons and the eugenics movement. In a rare display of judicial brevity, the
Court upheld the Virginia law, describing Buck as the “probable potential parent of
socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted . . . her welfare and that of society will be
promoted by her sterilization.” 60 The Court went on to find that “[i]t is better for all the
world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve
for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing
their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” 61
The high tide of the eugenics movement played a far greater role in facilitating the
development and ongoing reform of the special education system than did any altruistic
desire on the part of contemporary reformers. The evolution of the special education
system and its attendant policies of exclusion and segregation as applied to visually
58
Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck
v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 6-9.
59
Ibid., 58-61.
60
Buck v. Bell 274 U.S. 200, at 207 (1927).
61
Ibid.
22
impaired and blind students in Ohio from 1870 to 1930 demonstrated the application and
sophistication of the segregationist prong of the eugenics design. Special education
reform reflected a central objective of the eugenics movement as espoused by prominent
advocates of the period. By establishing the OSSB, and later by establishing segregated
classes in the common schools, administrators and educators, no matter how benign their
asserted reasons appeared necessarily made judgments about who was fit and desirable
and entitled to an academic-centered education in preparation to become valuable
contributors to society, and therefore deserving of full citizenship rights.
Although a formal eugenics movement did not occur in the U.S. until around
1910, the large number of prominent theorists from all disciplines who openly spouted
eugenic-oriented rhetoric on the national scale, coupled with the undeniable shift from
the institutional system to segregated classes in the 1880s, should force scholars to
reevaluate the traditional justifications for characterizing the eugenics movement so
narrowly. As was the case with race and gender, when one uses disability as a distinct
category of analysis, the traditional periodization devices are no longer instructive.
Earlier analytical frameworks neglected the role of disability itself and of individuals
with physical and mental disabilities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
As disability is introduced as the lens through which we view the era, the traditional
dividing points in the chronology are no longer useful to scholars.
The evolution of the special education system as a vehicle to perpetuate the
eugenics agenda in the U.S. developed in the face of a myriad of heterogeneous
movements directed toward social betterment, economic advancement, and increased
political involvement at all levels of government. Traditional scholars focused on
23
eugenics in the context of race relations or socio-economic hierarchies. Historians who
have undertaken an analysis of the nexus between disability and eugenics have restricted
the scope of their inquiries to the forced sterilization of the so-called feeble-minded.
Eugenic policy was, however, significantly broader in its means and objectives and the
socially marginalized groups it intended to target. The separation, sorting, characterizing,
and categorizing central to the eugenics agenda resulted in residential state schools for
students with physical disabilities and segregated classrooms in urban school districts. 62
Although segregated classes for blind students and those for students with some
usable vision were in part the product of the efforts of individuals and reform groups who
were genuinely concerned with quality education for this minority group, these classes
evolved and were maintained in large part as the result of the pressure applied by school
administrators and classroom teachers as a means to maintain order and efficiency in the
face of a rapidly transforming society. 63 Immigration law and policy was directed
toward preventing “undesirables” from entering the country and eventually qualifying for
citizenship status, but the dual-track education system that emerged was designed to
ensure a de facto denial of the rights and benefits inherent to citizenship for “undesirable”
children already in the U.S.
62
Joseph L. Tropea, “Bureaucratic Order and Special Children: Urban Schools, 1890s-1940s,”
History of Education Quarterly 27 (1987): 29-31.
63
Edward E. Allen, Special Features in the Education of the Blind During the Biennium, 19181920 (Washington: G.P.O., 1921); Robert Benjamin Irwin, Sight-Saving Classes in the Public Schools
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, c. 1920); Tropea, “Bureaucratic Order and Special Children:
Urban Schools, 1890s-1940s.”
24
By establishing special education classes and by segregating visually impaired
and blind students in the common schools, administrators, teachers, and professional
experts hailed mass deinstitutionalization as a progressive measure, and at the same time
preserved order, efficiency, and control in their classrooms. 64 This necessarily cloaked
administrators and teachers with almost unbridled discretion to make judgments about
who deserved an academic-based education that would allow them to grow up to be selfsufficient and economically productive and therefore desirable citizens as adults.
Administrators and teachers attempted to maintain order and stability in the nation’s
schools in the face of industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and the passage of
compulsory attendance legislation through back-door approaches that shifted the policy
from one of outright exclusion to one of intra-district segregation. 65
Proponents of a eugenics-oriented design, whether they formally labeled
themselves as eugenicists or not, assumed the role of prospectively determining which
64
I.M. Chaves, “Historical Overview of Special Education in the United States,” In
Mainstreaming: Problems, Potentials, and Perspectives, ed. Bates, T.L. West, and R. B. Schmer
(Minneapolis: National Support Systems Project, 1977), 25-41; Marg Csapo, “Segregation, Integration and
Beyond: A Sociological Perspective of Special Education,” BC Journal of Special Education 8 (1984):
211-214; Edgar A. Doll, “The Mental Health Value of Special Education,” Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 149, part 3 (1930): 133-137; Doris R. Entwisle and Karl L.
Alexander, “Entry Into Schools: The Beginning School Transition and Educational Stratification in the
United States,” Annual Review of Sociology 19 (1993): 401-423; Ohio Division of Special Education. A
Report to the Committee Studying the Educational Needs of Deaf and Blind Children in Ohio on the
Special Education of Deaf and Blind Children in Special Classes in the Public Schools Columbus, OH:
Ohio Division of Special Education, 1948, 1-3; Lewis A. Wilson, “Organization and Administration of
Special Education in the Public Schools,” Journal of Educational Sociology 6, no. 6 (1933): 371-374;
Winzer, History of Special Education; United States Congress, House of Representatives. Education of the
Blind, Washington: 1901, 1902, E.W.J Wallin, The Education of Handicapped Children (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 3-6; Arthur Wylie, “On the Psychology and Pedagogy of the Blind,”
Pedagogical Seminary 9, (1902): 127-129.
65
Tropea, “Bureaucratic Order and Special Children: Urban Schools, 1890s-1940s,” 29.
25
children would mature into valuable contributors to society and which would not.
Despite the surge of immigration, the widening socio-economic divide, and the growing
number of people with disabilities many administrators and lower-ranked educators
envisioned a homogeneous society where economic productivity was an objective
measure of personal value. For these individuals, the latter was interwoven and
inextricable from prevailing notions concerning the duties and benefits of U.S.
citizenship. 66
Progressive-era reform movements were the culmination of a broad array of
forces and ideas. Individuals who addressed themselves to reform of the special
education system did so in the name of progress, advancement, efficiency, and deference
to professional expertise. 67 Their unmasked motives were, however, informed by
anything but an honest, idealistic propensity toward progressive-oriented ideology. Like
the determinative label of scientific objectivity, progressive era ideals as applied to the
evolution of the special education system resulted in exclusion, segregation, and
ultimately the further marginalization of students with disabilities.68
66
Diana Owen, “Citizenship Identity and Civic Education in the United States,” presented at the
Conference on Civic Education and Politics in Democracies: Comparing International Approaches to
Educating New Citizens, September 26-October 1, 2004, 1-2; Mitja Sardoc, ed. Citizenship, Inclusion and
Democracy: A Symposium on Iris Marion Young (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006).
67
Alan Stoskopf, “An Untold Story of Resistance: African-American Educators and IQ Testing in
the 1920s and 30s,” Rethinking Schools 14, no. 1 (1999): 2-7; Allen, Special Features in the Education of
the Blind During the Biennium; Robert Benjamin Irwin, Sight-Saving Classes in the Public Schools
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, c. 1920); Tropea, “Bureaucratic Order and Special Children:
Urban Schools, 1890s-1940s,” 41-46.
68
Stoskopf, “An Untold Story of Resistance: African-American Educators and IQ Testing in the
1920s and 30s,” 8-10; Tropea, “Bureaucratic Order and Special Children: Urban Schools, 1890s-1940s,”
52-53.
26
Turn-of-the-century compulsory attendance legislation thrust classroom authority
and bureaucratic organization into a precarious relationship. Administrators were
charged with overseeing a now mandatory education system in which teachers could not
or would not comply fully with the black letter or the spirit of the law. Because strict
adherence to the laws and the ideals of classroom order, structure, and efficiency seemed
irreconcilable, administrators had to balance legal requirements and teachers’ demands.
The inherent conflict between strict compliance and the teachers’ argument that to do so
would undermine classroom autonomy was resolved in part with the creation of special
education classes. By adopting and perfecting back-door codes and rules of conduct,
administrators and teachers, and eventually expert staff responded to social, legal, and
economic changes, and at the same time maintained “organizational, if not pedagogical,
integrity.” 69
After Ohio enacted its compulsory attendance statute in 1877, segregated special
education classes served to preserve classroom order, stability, and efficiency in the
common schools. Professional standards and rhetoric invoked the "interests of the
child" 70 standard and were instrumental in establishing and legitimizing segregated
special education classes in urban districts. However, this standard, given credence by
the label of scientific objectivity and endorsement on the part of contemporary experts,
did not replace back door approaches that operated to allow administrators and teachers
to transform formal programs and legislative mandates into vehicles to preserve order and
69
Tropea, “Bureaucratic Order and Special Children: Urban Schools, 1890s-1940s,” 31.
70
Helen J. Coffin, “Sight Saving Classes, Cleveland Public Schools,”(Cleveland: Board’s
Division of Publications, 1926).
27
efficiency in the schools. 71 The evolution of informal rules and approaches as tools to
segregate undesirable students was central in shaping school policy in the early decades
of the twentieth century. 72 Segregation of students with disabilities, although rarely
interrogated from a critical perspective by traditional scholars in the context of the
broader eugenics design, operated to isolate “undesirable” students and consequently
denied them the requisite training to become productive citizens.
By 1930 the Great Depression had diverted public attention away from social
issues and toward questions of economics. 73 As Margaret A. Winzer observed, the 1930s
witnessed a “steady evaporation of the optimism surrounding special education,
especially segregated classes.” 74 For advocates of children with disabilities, the 1930s
saw a marked shift as evidenced by “mounting dissatisfaction with inadequately planned
classes staffed by untrained or poorly trained teachers, watered-down curriculum, the
total segregation of exceptional students, and the misinterpretation of the ideology and
practice of progressive education.” These problems were not new, but a shift in the
dimensions and contours of progressive thought and objectives allowed for widespread
public acknowledgement of these shortcomings. As a result of financial and moral
considerations, the role and power of local school districts decreased notably. Parents
and professionals became more vocal in their call for a complete overhaul of the existing
system. Beginning in the 1930s, the U.S. witnessed a new era in special education
history that commands a separate study at a later date.
71
Tropea, “Bureaucratic Order and Special Children: Urban Schools, 1890s-1940s,” 50-52.
72
Ibid.
73
Winzer, History of Special Education, 363-64.
74
Ibid., 364.
28
Chapter I offers an overview of the eugenics movement in the U.S. and analyzes it
as a logical extension of the progressives’ desire to secure rational and efficient solutions
to perceived social ills. It opens with a discussion of the movement’s history and its
underlying ideologies. It defines the movement and its key proponents and opponents
and demonstrates that its reach is substantially broader than the traditional scholarship
indicates. By undertaking a review of the existing scholarship on race relations, socioeconomic hierarchies, and forced sterilization of the feebleminded, it exposes the absence
of a serious consideration of the role of disability and how the segregationist arm of the
eugenics design erected barriers to full citizenship rights. Scholars have thus far
neglected a systematic analysis of the segregationist prong of the eugenics movement as a
vehicle in the development and evolution of the special education system in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The next chapter explores trends in general education during the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era, by highlighting the key figures and substantive curriculum changes that
took hold in the common schools. Chapter II analyzes the connection between Ohio’s
1877 compulsory attendance statute and the expansion of its special education system to
show that this legislation solidified and broadened existing segregationist practices.
Chapter III discusses the evolution of the special education system as applied to visually
impaired and blind students in Ohio. The chapter focuses first on the OSSB and then
segregated classrooms in the common schools in urban areas. It exposes the evolution of
the special education system at the OSSB and later in sight-saving classes, and
demonstrates how rigid segregationist practices spawned from eugenic-conscious
motives.
29
Chapter IV provides an overview of the chronological and thematic development
of existing characterizations and periodization schemes of the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era. It explores how the related themes of urbanization, industrialization,
and immigration guided by the progressive preference for order, rational planning, and
efficiency combined to push for a homogeneous national identity. First, it explores
traditional periodization measures as espoused by noted historians of the period. The
discussion then moves to the evolution of disability as a distinct, yet largely ignored
identity category and argues for an expansion of the traditional GAPE periodization
devices.
By analyzing the perception of disability, education reform, eugenics policy
understood broadly, and the defining characteristics of the progressive era, this work
indicates how the U.S. employed the segregationist arm of the eugenics campaign to deal
with so-called undesirable students. The evolution of residential state schools for the
blind and of segregated sight-saving classes in urban school districts was motivated by
the segregationist component of the eugenics agenda. Because scholars have not studied
the eugenics movement in any depth as it applied to visually impaired and blind
individuals, it necessarily follows that no rigorous analysis has been undertaken of how
the development of the special education system served as a vehicle to further the
segregationist prong of the eugenics design. This work necessarily implicates several
sub-fields of historiographical lineage and their points of convergence. Because of its
nature, this project relies on the histories of American values and identity, eugenics,
American education in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and education of blind and
visually impaired students--both at the OSSB and in urban school districts in Ohio. It ties
30
together bodies of research that were once separated by rigid boundaries. To this end, it
applies a disability-oriented lens to the eugenics movement in furtherance of the claim
that the education of visually impaired and blind students in Ohio from 1870 to 1930 was
driven by the segregationist prong of the eugenics agenda, which in turn, was central to
the determination of who was fit and desirable, and therefore deserving of the full rights
and benefits of U.S. citizens.
31
Chapter 2
Eugenics: The History and Ideology of a Pseudo-Science
and Its Parallels to Progressive Ideology and Reform
Viewed as a directive that mirrored and often prescribed generally accepted ideas
about who was valuable as determined and measured by economic productivity, and thus
deserving of the full rights of U.S. citizenship, eugenics was, understood broadly, not at
odds with progressive thought. The eugenics design complemented the contemporary
progressive ideals of order, efficiency, and rational planning. It was a multi-faceted
campaign that sought to forcibly remove undesirable traits and individuals from society.
In the U.S., the eugenics movement informed exclusionary and segregationist policies in
schools as well as race relations, social-economic hierarchies, and the forced sterilization
of the feebleminded.
During a period when the country witnessed a clear departure in the federal
government’s laissez-faire approach to economic and social policymaking definitive of
the nineteenth century, and the shift to an intentioned, rational approach that routinely
sought legitimacy through reliance on new scientific rhetoric and approaches, eugenics
emerged as a logical solution for a host of perceived social ills. Although the eugenics
design never rose to the level of prominence necessary to be considered a cornerstone of
progressive ideology, it paralleled and developed alongside general progressive thought.
Eugenics was as, U.S. biologist and historian Garland E. Allen observed, “the scientific
32
management of human evolution, and as such it brought human society and culture into
line with biological realities hitherto ignored or too easily dismissed.” 1
In an age characterized by efficiency, rational planning, and scientific
management, eugenics was ripe for expansion and exploitation by social, economic, and
political activists under the guise of reform-oriented policies. As social Darwinism had
been the defining theory of an earlier period characterized by classical economic and
social mandates of laissez-faire, eugenics provided the “perfect biological theory of
society” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It would be misleading to
suggest that changes in social mores automatically resulted in changes in explanatory
scientific theories. However, it is equally problematic to ignore the “patent parallel shift
in views of both economics and society on the one hand and biological models of society
on the other.” 2
Masquerading as a legitimate, scientifically-based reform movement in a period
of social, political, and economic upheaval, eugenics as it was traditionally explained
focused on hereditary factors to explain the origins of a wide array of social problems.
The alleged societal ills of the period included pauperism, alcoholism, criminal
misconduct, and physical and mental disabilities. As Allen correctly noted, eugenics
took hold as a social movement throughout most of the countries of Western Europe, but
it thrived in the United States. After 1900, bolstered by the rediscovery of Mendel’s law
of heredity, “the movement became, in the eyes of its American advocates, a major
1
Garland E. Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor, 1910-1940: An Essay in
Institutional History,” Osiris 2 (1986): 264.
2
Ibid, 225.
33
breakthrough in the application of rational, scientific methods to the problems of a
complex urban and industrial society.” 3
As it was traditionally understood, eugenics was a driving force behind some of
the most notable social and cultural movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Closely intertwined with contemporary ideologies of race relations, rational
identity, and gender it was inextricably tied to movements advocating population control,
social betterment, the welfare state, and segregation of those with disabilities. The
historiography of eugenics focused primarily on, in Dutch historian Frank Dikotter’s
words, “the most extreme expressions of race improvement in Germany, Britain, and the
United States.” 4 As a result, the existing scholarship is largely one-dimensional and
ignores the reach of the movement beyond the narrow contexts of race relations, socioeconomic status, and compulsory sterilization. 5 The narrative is devoid of any serious
analysis of the application of eugenics to other historically marginalized identity
categories, namely persons with disabilities.
As U.S. education historian Alan Stoskopf correctly noted, “when eugenics is
mentioned in the historiography of education, it is usually as a footnote to the social3
Ibid.
4
Frank Dikotter, “Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,” The American Historical
Review 103, no. 2 (1998): 467.
5
For example, H.S. Atkinson, “The Social Control of the Feebleminded,” Social Welfare 15
(1935): 121-23; Florence Beaman, Jon Beckwith, “An Historical View of Social Responsibility in
Genetics,” BioScience 43, no. 5 (1993): 327-333; G.H. Bogarth, “Sterilization of the Unfit: The Law in
Indiana, Connecticut, Utah, Oregon, and Ontario, Canada,” Texas Medical Journal 26 (1910): 279.; Philip
M. Ferguson, Abandoned to their Fate: Social Policy and Practice Toward Severely Retarded People in
America, 1820-1920 ( Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Ian R. Dowbiggin, Psychiatry and
Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880-1940 (Ithica, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); Mark
Haller, Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984);
Daniel J. Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Use of Human Heredity (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1985); Phillip R. Reily. Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United
States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
34
efficiency and scientific-management movement in U.S. schooling.” 6 Earlier studies
neglected a critical analysis of the interdependent relationship between eugenics and the
evolution of the special education system in the U.S. The development of the special
education system and its inherent policies of exclusion and segregation as applied to
visually impaired and blind students exemplified broader aims of eugenic policy.
Conceptualizing disability as a distinct category of analysis through which to
view the development of special education in the U.S. as evidence of the segregationist
prong of the eugenics design and its preoccupation with objective, tangible economic
value and therefore desirability among U.S. citizens was neglected by earlier writers.
To this end, scholars must analyze the intersect between eugenics, disability, and
progressive ideals. The chapter begins with a discussion of the history of the rise of the
eugenics movement, including its key proponents. It then exposes the gaps in earlier
studies that either ignored the connection between eugenics and disability, or confined
the discussion to compulsory sterilization.
As economist James A. Field pointed out in a 1911 article titled, “The Progress of
Eugenics,” the idea of a conscious and intentioned improvement of the human race was
not specific to the eugenics movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. 7 Over twenty-three hundred years ago the Greek philosopher Plato outlined a
detailed policy to control marital unions and subsequent procreation for the greater good
6
Alan Stoskopf, “Echoes of a Forgotten Past: Eugenics, Testing, and Education Reform,” The
Educational Forum 66 (2002): 126.
7
(1911): 2.
James A. Field, “The Progress of Eugenics,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 26, no. 1
35
of the state. His policy envisioned a society where the statesman would further the
welfare of his citizens to ensure that only the best would breed. 8 As Field observed;
Perhaps it was natural that this idea should have come early to the mind of a man
whose experience was with the compact citizen class of a city-state, and whose
ideal community was not so large but that each citizen might know how his
fellows lived; for it had been remarked that at the present day there is exceptional
scrutiny of marrying and giving in marriage among peoples or social classes so
isolated, clannish, an inbred that they must necessarily have discovered in their
own experience the virtue of good stock and the fate that follows the progeny of
degeneracy and constitutional disease. 9
Plato’s project was, however, too progressive and large in scope for Greece in the
fourth century B.C. E. In the centuries that followed, the laws of the Roman Empire,
church doctrines, and nations’ mercantilist-driven expansionism addressed population
control, kept records of the number of soldiers fighting, workers laboring, and lay citizens
who paid taxes to the Empire. Although the functionality of the Empire was dependent
upon a rigid social and economic hierarchy, it did not implicate the segregationist policies
directed at the classes of persons that the eugenics movement would later target. 10
In the mid-1800s, two distinct, yet complementary strands of scientific discourse
found their way into the major publications. Eventually, they converged to form the basis
of several generally accepted ideologies that underscored prominent social reform
movements in the U.S. nearly half a century later. Reformers used Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels’ 1848 work, The Communist Manifesto and Charles Darwin’s The
Origin of Species, published in 1859 as vehicles to uproot contemporary beliefs about
8
Plato, The Republic. 359 B.C.E., 459.
9
Field, “The Progress of Eugenics,” 3
10
Ibid.
36
human development and social progress. 11 It is well known that Marx and Darwin
corresponded and were interested in each other’s work. As English historian Clyde
Chitty observed, “Darwin’s evolutionary theories challenged the forces of tradition and
conservatism, especially in matters relating to religious orthodoxy; and Marx
immediately hailed the Origin as the basis in natural science for our views’.” 12 Because
Darwin’s political disposition was moderately liberal at best, he did not advocate, either
publicly or privately, revolutionary social movements. In this vein, he turned down
Marx’s offer to be the dedicatee of the second volume of Das Kapital. 13
Marx was forward-looking and envisioned a time when political and economic
power would pass into the hands of the working class as capitalism gave way to
communism. Although Darwin did not share Marx’s view that the fundamental flaws
inherent in capitalism necessarily dictated its downfall, he was, from the 1850s onward
receptive to the notion that his views encouraged readers to view the state as an
improvable entity, in which human agency was the driving factor. 14 In his conclusion of
Origin of Species, Darwin included the telling, albeit ambiguous statement that “as
natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental
endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.” 15
11
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection (London: John Murray, 1859);
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto ( London: M. Lawrence Ltd., 1848).
12
Clyde Chitty, Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education (Great Britain: Biddles Ltd., 2007),
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 402.
25.
37
However, in the years following the publication of The Origin of the Species
Darwin’s statements were taken out of their original context and misapplied to bolster
arguments that were diametrically opposed to optimistic conceptions of human progress.
They were used to explain social change as the end result of rigid rules of biological
processes. Darwin’s work became a vehicle to advance the claim that the development of
the human personality, for example, was controlled almost exclusively by nature and that
heredity trumped outstanding environmental factors. More generally, Darwin’s theory
that natural selection resulted in the “superiority” of human beings over plants and
animals, was extended to make the argument that natural selection had likewise
determined that some humans were “innately superior” to others. 16 Darwin’s conclusions
morphed into result-oriented arguments to establish a social hierarchy within the human
race itself.
Ideas that had once been embraced primarily by socialists and social-democrats
now caught the attention of right-wing philosophers and political theorists who openly
entertained the possibly that the process of natural selection could be applied to produce a
new race of superior beings. These individuals were marked to dominate and rule over
their “human inferiors” in the same way that humans dominated and “exploited”
animals. 17 Early theorists who applied Darwinian principles of evolution to their
analyses of social conditions and human progress differed widely on the question of
whether the state could and should be called upon to play a part in building a society
16
Mark A. Largent, Roundtable: “Disability in the History of Eugenics: History and Legacy in
Washington State” Washington State University, October 9, 2009.
17
Chitty, Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education, 26.
38
governed by “desirables.” 18 As an illustration, in his 1851 work, Social Statistics, British
philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” 19
Although he strongly believed that the state should not interfere in matters of social
policy, the phrase was interpreted by many as being “bland in the extreme, meaning no
more than that those who survive fit and those who are fit survive.” 20 Because it
neglected to note that “interference with individual life was necessary in the name of
racial improvement or survival,” prominent Social Darwinians like Benjamin Kidd and
Karl Pearson wholly dismissed Spencer’s suggestion of “laissez-faire individualism.” 21
The expansion of Darwin’s theories of evolution to argue in favor of a social
hierarchy within the human race itself did not go unchallenged. In a notable article titled,
“The Struggle for Existence,” published in 1888 in the Fortnightly Review, Thomas H.
Huxley argued that Darwin’s theory of natural selection should be confined to explaining
hierarchy and survival in the animal kingdom. He went on to note that the theory should
not be used to advance a large-scale competition among human beings for primacy. As
Huxley explained, the natural process must always be informed by an intentional,
rational, and ethical design. 22 In his 1893 Romance Lecture titled, Evolution and Ethics,
Huxley claimed that:
social conduct required self-restraint: in place of thrusting aside, or treading down
all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall
help his fellows’. Social policy should be directed not so much to the survival of
18
Ibid.
19
Herbert Spencer, Social Statistics (London: John Chapman, 1851), 81.
20
Chitty, Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education, 26.
21
Ibid.
22
Thomas H. Huxley, “The Struggle for Existence,” Fortnightly Review 52 (1888): 28-43.
39
the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It should repudiate
the gladiatorial theory of existence. By definition, the establishment of human
society implied the setting of clear limits; and the more complex the society
became, the more would the state need to intervene for the sake of the common
good. In particular, increased foreign competition in trade required sanitary
reform to create a healthy environment, together with improved educational and
recreational facilities to enhance the mental quality of the workforce. 23
However, as Chitty noted, despite the broad appeal of Huxley’s views among
many social reformers, it was, in the end, Francis Galton, Kidd, and Pearson who
“constituted the dominant force among Darwin’s disciples” in the end decades of the
nineteenth century. Among those men, Galton was the most influential. 24
It was Darwin’s second cousin, explorer and scientist Francis Galton who first
attempted to find scientific support and justification for a host of endeavors designed to
preserve, and when possible, facilitate the improvement of the human race. Born in 1822
into a prominent Midlands family, Galton enjoyed all the benefits that accompanied that
status. 25 His father served for a period as the High Bailiff of Birmingham and then went
on to serve as a magistrate and deputy lieutenant in Learnington in Warwichshire. Galton
was the grandson of the renowned physician and inventor Erasmus Darwin, thereby, as
U.S. biologist Nicholas W. Gillham observed, “deriving all the benefits of an enviable
pedigree.” 26 Frequently cloaked as a “Victorian polymath,” Galton made a name for
23
Thomas H. Huxley, “Evolution and Ethics,” The Romance Lectures, 1893, full text available
online at: http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE9/E-E.html
24
Chitty, Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education, 28.
25
Raymond E. Fancher, “Biographical Origins of Francis Galton’s Psychology,” Isis 74, no. 2
(1983): 227-233; Nicholas W. Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the
Birth of Eugenics (London: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3.
26
Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics, 3
40
himself in the arenas of African exploration, meteorology, geography, psychology,
statistics, human heredity, and the study of personal identification. 27
Positioned squarely in front of the alter in Claverdon Church in Warwickshire,
England is a plaque dedicated to Galton that reads: “Many branches of Sciences owe
much to his labours, but the dominant idea of his life’s work was to measure the
influence of heredity on the mental and physical attributes of mankind.” This brief
dedication sheds little light on the broad influence and power, “often of a malign nature,”
that Galton exerted “wherever he went, inspiring a solid group of admirers who could be
found carrying on his work long after his death in 1911.” 28 The text is devoid of any
mention of the more extremist prongs of his eugenics design, or of his dream of a
futuristic society dominated and ruled by an elite class of racially pure individuals. As
Chitty argued in his 2004 book, Education Policy in Britain, “Francis Galton is often
seen as one of the evil spirits of the nineteenth century, condemning succeeding
generations of psychologists to pursue a sterile debate between the absurd extremes of
environmental and genetic determinism and inspiring ideas and policies which would
cause misery and cruelty to millions of people in the century to come.” 29 As biographer
Martin Brookes pointed out, Galton was a man of unmatched energy and achievements,
but he argued that his work on hereditary determininism was result-oriented from the
outset and was undoubtedly influenced by the less than savory aspects of his personality.
As Brookes explained, “an immense snob, perennially preoccupied with distinctions of
27
Chitty, Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education, 28.
28
Ibid., 37.
29
Ibid., 83.
41
race, class and social status, Galton was routinely dismissive of those he considered
beneath him—women, black people and the poor.” 30
Despite his undeniable and lasting influence in the fields of heredity, psychology,
and eugenics, only four biographies were dedicated to Galton’s life and work. The first
and arguably the most influential was Karl Pearson’s four-volume Labour of Love: The
Life, Labour and Letters of Francis Galton, published between 1914 and 1930. 31 D.W.
Forrest’s 1974 volume, Francis Galton: The Life and Work of a Victorian Genius marks
the second of the four biographies. 32 The third, and arguably the first work to focus on
Galton with an adequate reference to chronology and context, was American geneticist
and biologist Nicholas Wright Gillham’s 2001 book, A Life of Sir Francis Galton. 33 The
final, and perhaps most critical secondary work devoted to Galton was Brookes’ 2004
volume, Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton. 34
Galton originally intended to pursue a career in medicine. However, during his
brief tenure at King’s College in London, he began corresponding with Darwin. 35
Drawing on the latter’s influence, Galton convinced his father to allow him to transfer to
Trinity College in Cambridge to study mathematics. In frequent letters to his father,
Galton suggested that a time at Cambridge would be both exciting and adventurous and
30
Martin Brookes, Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), xiv.
31
Karl Pearson, Labour of Love: The Life, Labour and Letters of Francis Galton (London:
Cambridge University Press, 1914).
32
Derek W. Forrest, Francis Galton: The Life and Work of a Victorian Genius (New York:
Taplinger, 1974).
23.
33
Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics, 17-
34
Brookes, Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton, 11-14.
35
Fancher, “Biographical Origins of Francis Galton’s Psychology,” 227-233.
42
would allow him to return to his medical studies immediately thereafter. A medical
degree required four years of education. At the time he switched to mathematics, Galton
had completed his second year. Because he was only seventeen at the time, he could not
qualify for the degree of Bachelor of Medicine for another four years. In part, this
prompted Galton to transfer to Cambridge. 36
During his time in Cambridge, Galton frequently fell ill and failed to graduate
with honors. Despite this perceived setback, his enthusiasm for applying quantitative
methods to scientific problems persisted. This was, as Chitty observed, to be “the
unifying thread that ran throughout his life and career.” 37 As Brookes pointed out, many
of Galton’s experiments involved “measuring for measuring’s sake: the product of an
obsessive drive he possessed from childhood.” 38
Galton never resumed his medical studies at King’s College. In October of 1844
his father died, leaving him a large inheritance that, in Galton’s view, negated the need to
further his education. For the next six years, a period that Pearson termed the “six fallow
years” 39 and Gillham described as “Galton’s rudderless period,” 40 he appeared to lose his
ambition and overall his life lacked direction. Between 1850 and 1852, he spent two
eventful and definitive years in Africa. Galton returned to England in 1852, a man of
great honor. He received the Royal Geographical Society’s Founder’s Medal in 1853,
and he was elected to the Society at the young age of 34. A social and political
36
Ibid.
37
Chitty, Educational Policy in Britain, 30.
38
Brookes, Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton, xiv.
39
Pearson, Labour of Love: The Life, Labour and Letters of Francis Galton, 12.
40
Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics, 4.
43
conservative, Galton was “proud to be a traditionalist who paid due deference to
established norms and values.” 41 After his induction into the Society in 1856, he quickly
secured a position as a member of the scientific community’s elite. 42
During the same period, Galton published two popular and influential books that
revealed his paternalistic view of social ‘others.’ In his 1853 work, Tropical South
Africa, Galton demonstrated his “crude and patronizing attitudes toward race and
primitive behavior.” 43 The text was ripe with his less than gratuitous characterizations of
the indigenous African peoples he encountered during his time there. As Brookes
observed, “these were not carefully considered anthropological insights or deft
illustrations of cultural contrasts. They often involved vicious, racist rhetoric.” 44
Galton’s account of his first meeting with the Nama people was instructive: “I found that
some had trousers, some coats of skin, and they clicked, and howled, and chattered, and
generally behaved like baboons. I looked on all these fellows as a sort of primitive link
with civilization.”45
He went on to wage an attack against the Damara’s religious
practices, culture, core values, and economic structure. In Galton’s words, “[t]here is
hardly a particle or romance, or affection, or poetry in their character or creed; but they
are a greedy, heartless silly set of savages.” 46
41
Chitty, Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education, 30.
42
Ibid., 34.
43
Francis Galton, Tropical South Africa (London: John Murray, 1853), 14; Francis Galton, The
Art of Travel (London: John Murray, 1855).
44
Brookes, Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton, 112.
45
Galton, Tropical South Africa, 8.
46
Ibid., 14.
44
Later in the work, Galton launched a scathing attack on the Damara language and
mathematical skills:
Once, while I watched a poor Damara floundering hopelessly over a large number
in a calculation on one side of me, I observed Dinah, my spaniel, equally
embarrassed on the other. She was overlooking half a dozen of her new-born
puppies, which had been removed two or three times from her, and her anxiety
was excessive, as she tried to find out if they were all present, or if any were still
missing. She kept puzzling and running her eyes over them backwards and
forwards, but could not satisfy herself. She evidently did have a vague notion of
counting, even though the figure was too large for her brain. Yet taking the tow
as they stood, dog and Damara, the comparison reflected no great honour on the
man.” 47
Despite the unpalatable nature of Galton’s statements as measured by present-day
standards, it was likely his Victorian audience found nothing objectionable in the work.
Although Britain abolished slavery in 1833, Galton’s characterization of Africans as
primitive and lacking any cultural sophistication reflected the racist consensus that
prevailed during the period. 48 Following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in
1859, Galton’s research and resulting publications took a clear departure from their
earlier focus on travel and meteorology. In his words, “it made a marked epoch in my
own mental development, as it did in human thought generally.” 49 Galton dedicated his
work to what he viewed as two interrelated phenomena: heredity and improvement of the
human race. He used the term “race” both in its strictest sense and as descriptive of the
human race as a whole. 50
47
Ibid., 14-15.
48
Chitty, Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education, 31.
49
Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton, 155.
Chitty, Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education, 32; Fancher, “Biographical Origins of
Francis Galton’s Psychology,” 227-233.
50
45
Coined by Galton in the subtitle to his 1875 work, English Men of Science: Their
Nature and Nurture, the nature versus nurture debate was central among eugenicists.
Galton never departed from his view that nature as opposed to nurture was determinative
of mental and physical abilities. In a time when modern intelligence quotient (IQ) tests
had not been developed, he relied on pedigree analysis, twin studies, and anthropometric
measures to investigate traits such as “talent and character.” 51 He invented new methods
that allowed for the analysis of massive amounts of data that he collected. As Gillham
observed, “[Galton] believed that favourable physical characteristics correlated with
superior mental qualities, but he had no way to compare them directly. Consequently, he
ventured into areas of psychology and personal identification, eventually landing upon
fingerprinting as a foolproof way to distinguish individuals.” 52 In its most rudimentary
form, pedigree analysis was a simple method for substantiating scientific theories that
held sway for close to fifty years. 53
In relying on pedigree studies, Galton reasoned that if “eminence, or at least
superior ability, was inheritable, then a great man’s closest male relatives were the most
likely to exhibit exceptional qualities. Qualitative information could be converted to
numerical data by making the simple assumption that a man was either eminent or he was
not.” 54 As Gillham noted, “his Victorian mindset viewed notable achievement as
principally a male prerogative.” 55 The gender-laden stereotypes and prejudices obvious
14-17.
51
Francis Galton, English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture (London: Macmillan, 1875),
52
Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics, 3.
53
Chitty, Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education, 32.
Ibid.
54
55
Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics, 155.
46
in Galton’s method, although reflective of the prevailing views of the era, was evidence
of his broader assumption that the world was constructed of various social and economic
hierarchies, amenable to qualitative and quantitative scrutiny.
As Chitty observed, “Galton was particularly concerned to ensure that ‘racial
purity’ should not be undermined in increasingly democratic and egalitarian societies
where the average level of ability and creativity might be in danger of declining as a
result of those at the bottom end of the social scale ‘over breeding.” 56
In contrast to
Marx and Darwin who viewed social developments as measuring rods of progress and
improvement, for Galton the idea of increasing the number and power of the working
class was unnerving at best. 57
The central and recurring themes in Galton’s work were set out succinctly in two
articles titled “Heredity Talent and Character” published in Macmillan’s Magazine in
June and August of 1865. 58 Because Macmillan’s was a prestigious and widely-read
publication in Britain, Galton could expect a sizeable audience. It was in this forum that
he first endeavored to extend Darwin’s theory of natural selection to human beings. For
Galton, the application of natural selection could not be confined to plants and animals.
He explained that the process could not be left to chance, and that selective breeding
should be applied to the end of promoting humans with superior qualities, and at the same
time used to discourage “unfit” or undesirable persons from marrying and procreating. 59
Galton was drawn to the following passage in Darwin’s Origin of Species:
56
Chitty, Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education, 32.
57
Ibid., 27.
58
Francis Galton, “Hereditary Talent and Character,” Macmillan’s Magazine (June, 157-166;
August, 318-327), 1865.
59
Ibid.
47
We cannot suppose that all breeds of animals were suddenly produced as perfect
and as useful as we now see them; indeed, in many cases, we know that this has
not been their history. The key is man’s power of accumulative selection: nature
gives successive variations, man adds them up in certain directions useful to him.
In this sense, he may be said to have made for himself useful breeds. 60
In attempting to shape the substantive contours and confines of what later became
known as Social Darwinism, Galton was equally concerned with establishing the
legitimacy of psychology as a science. In Heredity Genius, published in 1869, he stated
his objective:
To show in this book that a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance,
under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the
whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy, notwithstanding those
limitations, to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses
gifted with the particular powers of running or of doing anything else, so it would
be quite practicable to produce a highly gifted race of men, by judicious marriage
during several consecutive generations. I shall show that some social agencies of
an ordinary character, whose influences are little suspected, are at this moment
workings towards the degradation of human nature, and that others are working
towards its improvement. I conclude that each generation has enormous power
over the natural gifts of those that follow, and maintain that it is a duty we owe to
humanity to investigate the range of that power, and to exercise it in a way that,
without being unwise towards ourselves, shall be most advantageous to future
inhabitants of the earth. 61
In Hereditary Genius Galton published the findings of a large-scale genealogical
study of families. He argued that genius was a hereditary characteristic and was confined
almost without exception to well-to-do families with innate privileges and abilities. He
lauded the qualities of “judicious marriages,” and at the same time, pointed to the decline
of the human race by the conception of the “unfit.” Consequently, Galton argued that
leaders should enforce, or at least encourage adherence to strict breeding policies. Galton
60
Darwin, Origin of Species, 248.
61
Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry Into its Laws and Consequences (London:
Macmillan, 1869), 1.
48
attempted to employ pedigree analysis to prove, as he claimed, that “talent and character”
are inheritable traits. 62
The “degradation of human nature” that Galton referred to was undoubtedly, as
Chitty observed “brought about by the propagation of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘feeble-minded,’
but at this stage in his output, [he] was not clear as to what should be done about it.” 63
Galton began to articulate the concepts that would later be known as positive and
negative eugenics, but their contours remained ill-defined. From roughly 1865 to 1911,
Galton did not take a firm position on the question of how much power the central
government should use in these matters. However, as early as 1869, his work evidenced
a strong conviction that the average age of marriage played a vital role in determining the
health and vitality of the population as a whole. Because those who married at younger
ages statistically had larger families and produced more generations within a discreet
period of time, Galton reasoned that the most informed policy for any state to follow was
one that resulted in “retarding the average age of marriage among the weak, and
hastening it among the vigorous classes.” 64
Although he did not state it explicitly, in Heredity Genius, Galton was determined
to establish the inheritability of physical and mental traits. By subjecting certain traits
exhibited in 300 notable families to a crude form of pedigree analysis, he found almost
1,000 “eminent” men; in contrast to the one “eminent” man in 4,000 that he estimated for
the general population. Galton found that the closer the blood relation to the “eminent”
man, the higher the probability of distinction. In response to his opponents who pointed
62
Ibid., 32-53.
63
Chitty, Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education, 33.
64
Galton, Hereditary Genius, 206-207.
49
out that persons from privileged families had greater opportunities and would naturally
fare better, he argued that this was only a consideration in a small number of cases. The
charts and statistics that Galton manipulated and cited as evidence and attempted to cloak
in science-backed legitimacy, may be summarized in one central and final chapter of the
work—“Influences that Affect the Natural Ability of Nations—in Britain, and by analogy
throughout the world, it would never serve the best interest of a state for distinguished
races, classes, and individuals to postpone marriages until later in life or to restrict the
size of their families. As Galton explained:
I protest against the abler races being encouraged to withdraw…from the struggle
for existence. It may seem monstrous to some that the weak should be crowded
out by the strong; but it is still more monstrous that the races best fitted to play
their part on the stage of life should be crowded out by the incompetent, the
ailing, and the desponding . . . The time may hereafter arrive, in far distant years,
when the population of the earth shall be kept as strictly within the bounds of
number and suitability of race as the sheep on a well-ordered moor or the plants in
an orchard-house; in the meantime, let us do what we can to encourage the
multiplication of the races best fitted to invent and conform to a high and
generous civilization.” 65
Hereditary Genius’s central arguments were not universally accepted even at the
time of its publication, but it served as an impetus to an ongoing and increasingly divisive
discussion and broader movement. For a seven-month period around December of 1869,
reviews, both favorable and critical dominated the scholarly British journals. Many
reviewers praised the unparalleled originality of Galton’s design and methodology, but
most concluded that he failed to prove the centrality of heredity to the specified traits.
The Times’ conclusion was illustrative of that found in comparable publications; “Mr.
Galton is a little too anxious to arrange all things in the wedding garment of his theory,
65
Ibid., 310.
50
and will scarcely allow them a stitch of other clothing.” 66 Similarly, a writer in The
Saturday Review admonished Galton for having “bestowed immense pains upon the
empirical proof of a thesis which from its intrinsic nature can never be proved
empirically.” 67 As the writer continued, “the long array of names and figures which are
made to prop up the hypothesis of hereditary genius, however interesting as bits of
biography, seem to us to be logically worth nothing . . . The problem for all of us is to
distinguish the elemental germ of mental difference among the mass of elements of an
external kind among which it has its life and growth . . . How can we tease apart and
measure internal and external influences, when human life requires the united efforts of
both for its proper development?” 68
Writing for The Edinburgh Review, leading political economist Herman Merivale
identified the key fallacy inherent in Galton’s central argument. Relying on Galton’s
chapter on judges, Merivale noted that approximately 100 of the 125 eminent relatives of
judges that he cited were also attorneys. In Merivale’s estimation, this was less probative
of a supposed hereditary link resulting in a special talent of attorneys, and should instead
be viewed as a case of sons striving to follow the career paths of their fathers. 69 Finally,
the lengthy review in Chamber’s Journal noted that the book’s title was misleading
66
Charles H. Smith, “A review of Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws
and Consequences,” The Times March 18, 1870.
67
Review: Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences,” The
Saturday Review, May 5, 1870.
68
Ibid.
69
Herman Merivale, “Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences,” The
Edinburgh Review July, 1870.
51
because Galton focused on superior ability and talent. 70 In the preface to the 1892
edition, Galton acknowledged his earlier mistake. “The fault in this volume that I chiefly
regret is the choice of its title of Hereditary Genius, but it cannot be remedied now.
There was not the slightest intention on my part to use the word ‘genius’ in any technical
sense, but merely as expressing an ability that was exceptionally high and, at the same
time, inborn.” 71
Of the multitude of letters Galton received in response to Hereditary Genius, two
from Emily Shirreff, a leading activist and promoter of women’s education in Britain
were notable. She wrote passionately of the problems ignited by ambitious women of
“high ability” who rejected marriage in favor of careers: “Fathers suppose that most of
their daughters are willing to live in idleness until a husband takes them off their hands . .
. while the abler, the more energetic, the most fit to be mothers of a better generation will
revolt against the injustice of our social arrangements, and struggle singly for an
independent position; thereby sacrificing at once the interests of society and some of the
highest cravings of their own nature.” 72 Shirreff made a point that would be echoed
repeatedly in the eugenics-based writings of the early twentieth century. Significantly,
“because they were single-minded and ambitious, the fittest women rejected or postponed
marriage in favour of demanding career, thereby leaving production of the next
generation to women who were poorly endowed intellectually.” 73
70
Review, “Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences,” Chambers Journal,
21 February 1870.
71
Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry Into its Laws and Consequences, 25-26.
72
Emily Shirreff letters to Francis Galton, March 16 and May 8, 1870. Full text available online
at: http://galton.org/cgi-bin/searchImages/search/pearson/vol2/pages/vol2_0159.htm
73
Ibid.
52
Although Galton understood the dilemma Shirreff described, promotion of early
marriage among the intellectual elite, while at the same time encouraging the lower
classes to have few if any children, remained one of the core tenets of the early eugenics
design to ensure the ongoing vitality of the state. Over time, Galton realized that absent
an external structure based on a system of economically-based incentives and
disincentives, it would be difficult if not impossible to secure the necessary cooperation
of all social classes. Beginning in 1883, he sought to articulate a clearer agenda that
incorporated a system of economically-oriented incentives and disincentives. In Inquiries
into Human Faculty and its Development, Galton coined the term “eugenics” 74 Taken
from the Greek word eugenes,’ it described an individual hereditarily gifted with
aristocratic qualities. Even in his definitive early work, Galton expressed the definition
of eugenics in various ways. The variance among definitions is noteworthy because it
allowed proponents of the design wider latitude in choosing subjects and classes of
persons most amenable to eugenic practices. By focusing solely on race relations, class
divisions, and compulsory sterilization traditional scholars ignored the broad scope and
wide reach of eugenic theories and practices.
Over time the definition changed substantively to target other historically
marginalized groups. Galton initially described eugenics as “the study of all agencies
under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations,
either physically or mentally.” 75 Later, he broadened the formulation to include “the
study of methods of improving the innate quality of the human race, especially by
selective breeding.” In the years that followed the publication of Inquiries into Human
74
Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 17.
75
Ibid.
53
Faculty, Galton adhered to a broad definition of eugenics—a science dedicated to
exploring the “influences that both preserve the inborn qualities of a race and, at the same
time, develop them to the utmost advantage.” 76
In Inquiries into Human Faculty, Galton delineated a prescriptive agenda directed
toward facilitating his racially-targeted objectives. The central idea was that
headmasters, ministers, and doctors should have the power to collect specific, detailed
pedigree data on young males. Eventually, school-age males would be classified based
on their natural physical and mental abilities, and further inquiries would be made into
the genealogies of those who were considered “hereditarily remarkable.” 77 Over time,
“families of good breeding, with sons capable of living up to their parents’ performance,
would multiply rapidly, while those at the bottom end of the social scale would be
encouraged to wither away. The inferior classes, especially those showing signs of
physical or mental weakness, would be expected to remain celibate, being treated ‘with
all kindness’ by their social superiors, provided they did so.” 78 If such persons did
procreate they would forfeit all claims to kind treatment, and would subsequently be held
out as enemies of the state. Despite Galton’s desire to prescribe a systematic, and welldefined eugenics program that included economically-based rewards and sanctions,
Inquiries into Human Faculty, evidenced the continued vagueness and ill-defined scope
and reach of his agenda. This was especially apparent in the context of the “propagation
76
Ibid., 39.
77
Ibid., 16-17.
78
Chitty, Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education, 38.
54
of the unfit.” Galton left the issue to later eugenicists who articulated policies of forced
sterilization and segregation for these marginalized social groups. 79
The latter point proved divisive among scholars. At issue was the question of
whether Galton should be charged with setting the stage for later movements including
compulsory sterilization and the Holocaust. Brookes argued that Galton was a
“significant contributor to . . . a complex chain of events,” although he claimed it was
unfair to place the blame for later extremist movements solely on him. 80 Independent
from his often singular focus on heredity, Galton was a moral relativist with little value
for democracy and its accompanying ideals. However, Brookes went on to cite multiple
instances in which Galton’s characterizations of eugenics “sound uncannily prophetic of
Hitler’s National Socialism.” 81
Gillham, in contrast, argued that “Galton would have been horrified had he known
that, within little more than twenty years of his death, forcible sterilization and murder
would be carried out in the name eugenics, for he was not a mean or vindictive man.” 82
In a 2002 review of Gillham’s biography published in London Review of Books, Andrew
Berry admonished Gillham for absolving Galton of what he considered to be the natural
and inescapable result of his work. In short, Berry contended that Galton carried some
79
Ibid.
80
Brookes, Extreme Measures, 297.
81
Ibid.
82
Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics, 357.
55
responsibility for the ways in which subsequent scholars and activists interpreted his
theories and attempted to implement them. 83
In July of 1912, the First International Congress of Eugenics convened at the
Hotel Cecil in London. In attendance were a number of distinguished biologists,
physicians, and politicians from Britain, Europe, and the U.S. The meeting was
organized and coordinated by the Eugenics Education Society that was founded in
November of 1907. The Congress was publicized in the Society’s journal, the Eugenics
Review. Former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour gave a speech at the inaugural banquet to
“toast our foreign friends and guests.” 84 Among the 500 principal speakers and guests in
attendance were the Lord Mayor of London, the American Ambassador, Winston
Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Alexander Graham Bell. The Congress was
divided into four sections: Biology and Eugenics, Practical Eugenics, Sociology and
Eugenics, and Medicine and Eugenics. 85
The Congress was significant because it showcased the recurrent themes in the
eugenic ideology of the early twentieth century. Similar sentiments and fears ran as
continuous strands through the presentations: “Western civilization was in danger of
collapse, since we were preserving the weak and the ‘genetically undesirable’ and
allowing them to breed at an alarming rate.” 86 The pauper pedigrees showcased at the
Congress highlighted the heritability of undesirable traits among the dregs of society, and
83
Andrew Berry, Review: “Whenever You Can, Count,” London Review of Books September
84
“First International Eugenics Conference,” The British Medical Journal 2, no. 2692 (1912):
85
Ibid.
86
Chitty, Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education, 46.
2002.
253-254.
56
was held out as conclusive evidence that the poor, feeble-minded, and persons with
physical disabilities were capable of producing offspring and would eventually take over
and eclipse their social betters unless scientists united and intervened with a reasoned
program calculated toward directing genetic measures. On the last day of the Congress,
Leonard Darwin addressed the attendees, and urged them to return home and advocate for
legislation designed to “stamp out feeblemindedness and physical ailments from future
generations.” 87 The attendees were instructed to achieve this objective by employing any
means necessary. 88
Galton’s vision of a utopian society populated by the racially pure and physically
and mentally fit, not matter how vaguely outlined in his work, was ripe for all types of
“sinister connotations” in the first half of the twentieth century. 89 What Galton paraded
as a new avenue of scientific inquiry would become a “dogmatic prescription in the
ranking and ordering of human worth.” 90 His followers organized conventions,
conferences, and seminars to garner widespread support for their interpretations of his
theories. These efforts clamored loudly in their grasps for legitimacy by invoking
generally accepted scientific theories and disciplines. Eugenics was, as Dikotter pointed
out:
Not so much a clear set of scientific principles as a ‘modern way’ of talking about
social problems in biologizing terms: politicians with mutually incompatible
beliefs and scientists with opposed interests could all selectively appropriate
eugenics to portray society as an organic body that had to be guided by biological
laws. Eugenics gave scientific authority to social fears and moral panics, lent
respectability to racial doctrines, and provided legitimacy to sterilization acts and
87
“First International Eugenics Conference,” 253-54.
88
Ibid.
89
Stoskopf, “Echoes of a Forgotten Past,” 126.
90
Ibid.
57
immigration laws. Powered by the prestige of science, it allowed modernizing
elites to represent their prescriptive claims about social order as objective
statements irrevocably grounded in the laws of nature. Eugenics promoted a
biologizing vision of society in which the reproductive rights of individuals were
subordinated to the rights of an abstract organic collectivity. 91
The establishment of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Springs Harbor,
Long Island in 1910 was central to the development of a formal eugenics movement in
the U.S. 92 It was the end product of a myriad of social forces colliding during the period.
The ERO allowed the eugenics agenda the front of a legitimate scientific movement and a
solid institutional base from which it could be coordinated and directed. As Allen
observed, “the ERO became a meeting place for eugenicists, a repository for eugenics
records, a clearinghouse for eugenics information and propaganda, a platform from which
popular eugenics campaigns could be launched, and a home for several eugenics
publications.” Ultimately, it became a “nerve center” for the movement as a whole. The
ERO had two main objectives: to conduct research on human heredity, especially the
inheritability of social traits; and to educate the general community about the significance
of eugenics research and the role of its findings in defining public policy. 93
Although other institutions and groups played a vital role in the movement, the
ERO’s existence spanned almost the entire history of eugenics in the U.S. As a result, its
objectives and activities to further those goals were illustrative of broader trends in the
design. The ERO was, as Allen contended, “a microcosm of the larger social macrocosm
91
Dikotter, “Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,” 467-68.
92
Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor,” 225.
93
Ibid., 238.
58
that was the American eugenics movement.” 94 Significantly, it was headed by Charles
B. Davenport, one of the most prominent advocates of the eugenics movement.
Davenport spearheaded the eugenics campaign in the U.S. In 1887, he received a
degree in engineering from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. He received an A.B. from
Harvard in 1889. The same year, he enrolled in Harvard’s graduate program and
received his Ph.D. in 1892, writing his dissertation on morphology under the direction of
E.L. Mark. Davenport stayed on as an instructor at Harvard until 1899 when an assistant
professorship became available at the University of Chicago. In 1904, he convinced the
Carnegie Institution of Washington to appropriate funds for the Station for the
Experimental Study of Evolution (SEE). He appointed himself director and served in that
capacity until his retirement in 1934. The SEE was established to study the development
of plants and nonhuman animals. When the ERO was founded to study the heredity and
development of human beings, Davenport also became director of that institute. 95
During his tenure at the University of Chicago, one primary consideration
prompted Davenport to establish an independent research laboratory. Because his
research interests focused on large animals and mice, he required expansive facilities for
adequate care, observation, and breeding. Davenport, who had taught at the summer
program at Cold Springs Harbor since 1892, saw it as a prime location for his research
needs. 96 With the financial backing of the Carnegie Institute and several other
94
Ibid., 227.
95
Field, “The Progress of Eugenics,” 36-42.
96
Ibid., 38-39.
59
philanthropic enterprises, he secured ongoing funding to purchase the existing facilities
and sufficient land to expand when the ERO was founded in 1910. 97
Davenport’s method for funding the establishment and ongoing research at the
ERO reflected several core ideals of progressive thought. Edward H. Harriman, the
railroad guru who amassed a sizeable fortune based on his control of the Union Pacific,
Southern Pacific, and Illinois Central lines, died in 1909. Valued at approximately $70
million, Harriman’s estate was left by will to his widow, Mary W. Harriman. In
managing her late husband’s estate, Mary Harriman developed the concept of “efficient
giving.” Or, philanthropy intentioned to help individuals become more efficient
members of society. She continued the family tradition of giving monetary gifts to
conservation groups, hospitals, the arts, and charitable organizations focused on aiding
the poor. A central principle of Harriman’s philanthropy was to foster cooperation and
scientific planning in every facet of society. This idea, with its explicit devotion and
commitment to order, efficiency, and rational planning was in line with progressive
thought. Essentially, Mrs. Harriman used her vast resources to promote cohesiveness and
order in every aspect of society—from honest government and urban development to the
care of the mentally ill. 98 She eschewed any tendency toward individualism and
competition, despite the fact that her husband had thrived on the latter and became a
multi-millionaire as a result. It was from John Muir and C. Hart Merriam (director of the
United States Biological Survey), that she and her husband gained an appreciation for and
insight into the role of the application of scientific principles to create a more rational and
97
Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor,” 231-235.
98
Ibid.
60
orderly society --“according to an order that existed so clearly in nature if human beings
would only learn from it.” 99
In line with her desire to assist individuals in becoming more efficient members
of society, Mrs. Harriman did not support the foundation concept traditionally tied to
philanthropy. She wanted to have close personal contact with all the projects she
supported. She did not back any venture for which she “did not feel complete
sympathy.” 100 In the months following her husband’s death, Mary Harriman received
numerous requests for financial backing for various projects. One of them came from
Davenport for assistance in establishing the ERO. She was impressed by his proposal to
study hereditary social traits with the objective of curing or eradicating social ills. He
emerged from a series of formal interviews and discussions Mrs. Harriman’s promise of
ongoing financial support for the ERO. She was the primary donor for the next seven
years and she contributed an additional $246,000 in overhead and operating costs, which
included salaries, office equipment, furniture, and indexing materials. Between 1910 and
1918, or the so-called “Harriman period” in the ERO’s history, Davenport and Mrs.
Harriman communicated almost daily. 101 He consulted with her about all his ideas and
plans, no matter the breadth of their scope. As Allen succinctly observed, the letters
revealed “the extent to which Davenport presented his ideas, large and small, to her,
99
George Kennan, E. H. Harriman: A Biography in Two Volumes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1922), 17-18.
100
Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor,” 234.
101
Ibid.
61
explained his decisions, sought her advice, and submitted every major decision for her
approval.” 102 As Davenport wrote following her death in 1932:
For us at the Eugenics Office the things that counted most were her
understandings of the needs of the work at a time when it was ridiculed by many
and disesteemed by many others. As she often said the fact that she was brought
up among well bred race horses helped her to appreciate the importance of a
project to study heredity and good breeding in man. Though she could turn a deaf
ear to many appeals to the emotions, she had a lively sympathy for those things of
whose lasting value she felt sure. 103
In short, Mrs. Harriman’s “style of philanthropy was of an older, more
personalized variety, less national in scope than that of the rising foundations. Both
directed themselves at social control, but their scale and methods diverged markedly.” 104
She straddled the intersection between more traditional philanthropic forms and the
progressive desire to use monetary and other types of incentives to urge a more
intentioned, reasoned course and outcome.
In 1917, the Carnegie Institute of Washington (CIW) assumed responsibility for
the annual operating costs and future expansion of the ERO. Mrs. Harriman transferred
the ERO to the CIW, with an additional endowment of $300,000, thus affording the ERO
an unprecedented degree of financial independence as compared to other CIW
departments. The period between 1918 and December 31, 1939 when the ERO finally
closed its doors was termed the “Carnegie period.” During that time, the CIW allocated
approximately $25,000 annually to cover operating expenses. As Allen explained, “[t]he
102
Ibid.
103
Draft of a one-page eulogy, “Mrs. Harriman,” Davenport Papers, American Philosophical
Society, Philadelphia.
104
Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor,” 235.
62
Harriman period was one of expansion and growth, the Carnegie period, one of
stabilization and eventual decline.” 105
Because of Davenport’s centrality to the rise and development of the eugenics
movement in the U.S., a discussion of his ideological bases and research methods is
necessary. Davenport’s demands for research, education, and legal reform to further the
eugenics agenda were extreme in nature during the ERO’s early years. Less than a year
before the ERO was founded, he delivered a lecture at Yale University in New Haven,
Connecticut in which he summarized his eugenics design. Davenport proposed a system
that would survey specified family traits. This, in his view, would “identify those lines
which supply our families of great men.” 106 He continued;
But we should also learn whence come our 300,000 insane and feeble-minded,
our 160,000 blind or deaf, the 2,000,000 that are annually cared for by our
hospitals and Homes, our 80,000 prisoners and the thousands of criminals that are
not in prison, and our 100,000 paupers in almshouses and out. This three or four
per cent of our population is a fearful drag on our civilization. Shall we as an
intelligent people, proud of our control of nature in other respects, do nothing but
vote more taxes or be satisfied with the great gifts and bequests that
philanthropists have made for the support of the delinquent, defective, and
dependent classes? Shall we not rather take the steps that scientific study dictates
are necessary to dry up the springs that feed the torrent of defective and
degenerate protoplasm? 107
Like Galton, Davenport relied on analogies as opposed to direct tangible evidence
to construct his arguments. In arguing for a serious and reliable comparison between
poultry and human beings, he assumed that superficial similarities in hereditary patterns
between two entirely different species provided the necessary degree of similarity to
105
Ibid., 236.
106
Charles B. Davenport, “Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding,”
Lecture delivered at Yale University, November 1909.
107
Davenport, “Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding,” 1909.
63
support a conclusion based on genetic causality. 108 Like Galton, he dismissed the claim
that an individual’s unique economic and social environment was determinative in the
development of particular traits. Davenport’s result-oriented methodology led to a
conclusion that social problems were not the result of environmental factors, but instead
were the product of “bad genes.” 109 He frequently lectured in academic venues urging
lay persons and wealthy philanthropists alike to contribute funds to eugenics research,
and not to charitable endeavors. The latter course, in Davenport’s view, would encourage
hereditary degeneracy. In a 1909 report to the Committee on Eugenics of the American
Breeders’ Association, he stated: “Vastly more effective than a million dollars to charity’
would be ten million to eugenics. He who, by such a gift, should redeem mankind from
vice, imbecility and suffering would be the world’s wisest philanthropist.” 110
In both public and private arenas Davenport ridiculed social reform and its
proponents. He frequently told the story of a man who found a rotten gourd, but insisted
on watering it daily. The man, Davenport claimed, was analogous to caretakers at state
institutions for the mentally ill or physically disabled. 111 For Davenport, the care and
treatment of persons with disabilities was an unfruitful endeavor that that encouraged the
maintenance of undesirables by the state. Lack of economic and social success were, in
his estimation, “de facto the phenotypic expressions of genotypic inferiority.” 112 In 1912
he advised the National Conference of Charities and Corrections that social reform efforts
108
Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor,” 245.
109
Ibid.
110
Davenport, “Report of the Committee on Eugenics,” Rep. American Breeder’s Assoc, 94.
111
Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor,” 246.
112
Ibid.
64
were futile because “the only way to secure innate capacity is by breeding it.” 113 For
Davenport the analogy between breeding plants and animals on the one hand, and
humans on the other was self-evident. 114
The ERO and other similar institutions designed to define and then implement the
eugenics campaign in the U.S. were the product of the convergence of many social
forces. These trends were sparked in large part by the rapid growth of industrial
capitalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As an institutional structure, the
ERO was established and developed by those with the financial means and scientific
knowledge to embark on a large-scale crusade against what they identified to be a marked
disintegration of the economic and social structures in the U.S. Eugenicists and their
disciples attributed this breakdown to poor planning and inefficient management of the
human germ plasm. 115 Eugenics represented one of many attempts to apply the concepts
of scientific management and rational planning to society at a time when it was under
extreme stress due to its transition from a primarily rural, agrarian nation to a
predominately urban-based, industrial order. 116
Although international in scope, the eugenics movement quickly took root and
attracted a diverse following in the U.S. The culmination of diverse economic and social
factors made the country a perfect lab in which a eugenics campaign could thrive. As
Stoskopf explained:
113
Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1963), 65.
114
Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor,” 245.
115
Dikotter, “Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,” 467-68.
116
Ibid.
65
Eugenic ideas would need the right social context to emerge and thrive. The
United States at the turn of the century was experiencing large-scale immigration
from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as the beginning of African-American
migration from the Jim Crow South to the Northern cities. Competition for jobs
intensified existing frictions along class and racial lines. It was out of this
cauldron of social upheaval that the U.S. eugenics movement began. For many
native-born European Americans, these changes threatened their social status.
Eugenics advocates articulated those fears through the language of academic
research and social reform. 117
Eugenics was in line with progressive ideology and its emphasis on order,
efficiency, rational management, and improvement of the races. However, these policies
targeted marginalized political, economic, and social groups and were inherently
oppressive and paternalistic. Groups and individuals were singled out and labeled as
“undesirable.” The labels of “undesirable,” “inadequate,” “unfit,” and their underlying
justifications were not interrogated from a critical perspective. As the argument ran,
these individuals were most likely to become social and financial burdens to society.
The U.S. eugenics movement evidenced the culmination of a number of broad political,
social, and economic trends that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Like most movements associated with the progressive era, the eugenics design
was heterogeneous in its scope and reach from the outset. It was, as Dikotter observed:
Part of such widely discussed issues as evolution, degeneration, civilization, and
modernity, and touched on a wide variety of emerging fields like maternity,
psychiatry, criminology, public health, and sex education. It was supported by
scientific societies, pressure groups, and political institutions in such different
countries as India, Brazil, and Sweden. Widely seen to be a morally acceptable
and scientifically viable way of improving human heredity, its main tenets were
embraced by social reformers, established intellectuals, and medical authorities
from one end of the political spectrum to the other. 118
117
Stoskopf, “Echoes of a Forgotten Past,” 123-24.
118
Dikotter, “Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,” 467.
66
As an institution, the ERO brought together multiple threads of social history. It
reflected notions of reform, order, scientific planning, efficiency, and social control,
sentiments harbored by its wealthy contributors and their middle-class professional
advisers. 119 The progressive-oriented design professed a general tendency toward reform
that grew at least in part out of evangelical notions of responsibility as illustrated by
Carnegie’s own “gospel of wealth”; the large scale industrialization and its attendant
economic changes, especially the shift from laissez-faire to controlled capitalism; the cult
of efficiency as developed in the industrial sector, and perfected in the social sphere; the
emergence of a new middle class of professional managers, social workers, engineers,
scientific experts, and foundation directors; and finally, a pervasive preoccupation with
the problems of social control and directing scientific knowledge toward the end of
economic and social stability. 120
The closing decades of the nineteenth and the opening decades of the twentieth
centuries were marked by upheaval in demographic, class, and economic patterns.
United States historian Robert Wiebe, characterized the period as a “search for order,”
thus suggesting a widespread floundering and disorder in political, social, and economic
pursuits. 121 For Wiebe, it was a search for stability, integration, and social control in the
face of a society that was changing rapidly and appeared to many to be fragmenting. 122
The various responses to the perceived disintegration of political, economic, and social
structures have been loosely shelved under the vague and permeable periodization termed
119
Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor,” 255.
120
Ibid.
121
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).
122
Ibid.
67
the “Progressive Era.” The intersect of eugenics, special education, and citizenship and
its inherent inability to mold to traditional modes of periodization will be discussed at
length in a later chapter. Here, it is enough to note that historians have long taken issue
with the term, “progressive” which implies a liberal forward-looking eye toward
advancement, improvement, and achievement. There is also a debate over the question of
whether there was a single, unified movement that may be subjected to a common
chronology. Despite these variances, notable concerns and viewpoints gained
ascendency during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
United States historian James Weinstein cited the notable shift that wealthy elites
made from laissez-faire to planned capitalism between 1890 and 1920. 123 Mass
industrialization created a variety of new economic problems, but it also highlighted
many of the problems already faced in earlier stages of the rise of U.S. capitalism:
dramatic price fluctuations, inflation, the failure of many small business ventures
following the rise of monopolies, and economic depressions. 124 In response to these
recurrent issues, the number of trade unions increased significantly beginning in the
1880s. The Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886, the Homestead Steel Strike in 1892, and
the Pullman Strike in 1894 threatened the continued economic security and viability of
the upper classes. After 1900, agitation on the part of the working class continued with
the San Francisco General Strike in 1900, the Lawrence, Massachusetts textile strike in
1912, the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado in 1915, strikes in Patterson and Bayonne, New
Jersey also in 1915, and the Seattle General Strike in 1919, to name a few of the most
123
James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 (New York: Beacon
Press, 1968).
124
Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor,” 255-56.
68
well known strikes. The ensuing labor agitation and social unrest occasioned by workers’
demands for minimal provisions became a major concern among the nation’s wealthy
elites. As Allen suggested, “various sectors of the wealthy business class had gradually
been won by these realities to the concept of a more planned economy—and that meant
using scientific and technical knowledge where possible to organize and regulate
economic activities.” 125 This period also witnessed the passage of the Sherman Antitrust
Act in 1890 and the beginning of government control and regulation of numerous
business pursuits: the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887, the
enactment of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, and the creation of the Federal Trade
Commission in 1914. 126
In a period characterized by central regulation, the emphasis on efficiency was
paramount. The latter, an inherently vague and fluid objective, infiltrated virtually every
aspect of society, from conservation to urban politics, criminology, education, and
medicine. As Allen observed, “[i]n the marketplace as well as in the workplace, a
concern, almost a fanaticism about efficient use of time, space, and energy engulfed
American business leaders.” 127 Frederick Winslow Taylor and other efficiency experts
developed a science of efficient business operation. Over time, “[e]fficiency came to
mean analysis of the input and output of factory machinery and human activities alike,
the breaking down of complex tasks into discrete components under the control of
planners, and finally, accentuation of the process of division of labor, including such
125
Ibid., 256.
126
Dikotter, “Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,” 467-470.
127
Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor,” 256.
69
innovations as the assembly line.” 128 As applied to social ills, efficiency meant
correcting problems at their point of origin, not repairing past damage. Prevention,
therefore, became a key mode of organization within the broader trend toward efficiency.
Efficiency presupposed knowledge of scientific principles, and it soon became common
parlance to speak of specific types of reform as the scientific answer to social ills.
The application of rational designs and efficiency to perceived social ills required
the active engagement and participation of scientifically trained experts. They held
themselves out as professionals charged with applying technical concepts and knowledge
to a wide array of problems. Professional experts played an integral role in modernizing
U.S. industry at the turn of the century. Experts served two distinct, yet interrelated
purposes: they acted as advisers who supplied technical information or problem-solving
skills, and as managers who oversaw the daily operations of a business entity, a
government agency, a medical care facility, or an educational institution. Although
experts of the period were of middle class status, they succeeded in transcending
traditional boundaries and secured a place that aligned them with the objectives and
desires of the wealthy elites who employed them. 129
Several scholars have noted the importance that business leaders and their
professional managers placed on the social and natural sciences for their developing
notions of economic and social control. 130 Social control implied more than active
preservation of the status quo, and as a result, it was linked with ideas of efficiency.
128
129
Ibid.
Ibid., 257.
130
See e.g. Herman Schwendlinger and Julia R. Schwendlinger, The Sociologist of the Chair: A
Radical Analysis of the Formative Years of North American Sociology, 1883-1922 (New York: Basic
Books, 1974); and Clarence Karier, “Testing for Order and Control in the Corporate Liberal State,”
Educational Theory 22 (1972): 154-180.
70
Contemporary business leaders and their professional advisers attempted to link social
and economic control with greater efficiency as measured by economic production and
related quantitative standards. Social control envisioned the melding of fragmented parts
of society into an integrated, cohesive whole. Arguably, social control served as a
vehicle for wealthy business leaders and their advisers to perpetuate their own values and
status. Social control and the ideal of efficient planning were interrelated, and eugenics
and its segregationist component fit squarely within this newly constructed scheme.
The ERO’s ideology and organizational structure exemplified the central and
definitive features of U.S. society as a whole in the early twentieth century. First,
eugenics was cloaked as a reform movement directed at curbing and eliminating
perceived social ills, namely the problem of the “defective classes.” 131 It was also a
movement based at least in theory, on rational, scientific planning with order and
efficiency as its objectives. Davenport outlined the central aims of the eugenics design in
his 1910 book, Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding:
This three or four per cent of our population is a fearful drag on our civilization.
Shall we as an intelligent people, proud of our control of nature in other respects,
do nothing but vote more taxes or be satisfied with the great gifts and bequests
that philanthropists have made for the support of the delinquent, defective
classes? Shall we not rather take the steps that scientific study dictates as
necessary to dry up the springs that feed the torrent of defective and degenerate
protoplasm? 132
An unmistakable blueprint for rational social control, Davenport’s work opened
with a primer on Mendelian genetics and claimed that “were our knowledge of heredity
more precisely formulated there is little doubt that many certainly unfit matings would be
131
Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor,” 258.
132
Davenport, Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding, 2-3.
71
prevented.” 133 In their desperate grasps for legitimacy, Davenport, Laughlin, and other
eugenicists claimed to apply objective, science-backed methods to social problems. As
Harry Laughlin stated in 1913:
In justice to the new science, it must be said for most of the traits specifically and
extensively studied, the student of eugenics can confidently predict the nature of
the offspring of two parents of known ancestry. To the degree that this prediction
can be made, eugenics is justified in calling itself a science, for here, as in all
other cases, predictability is the criterion of the understanding of nature. 134
By portraying themselves as scientists with expert knowledge, and the ERO as a
“scientific institution,” Davenport, Laughlin, and other eugenicists clamored for a role in
policies of social control and planning on the same scale as those who rose to prominence
as social planners in industry and government. 135 They believed it was necessary to
remove the responsibility for social planning and control from the hands of lay
individuals and place it instead in the hands of scientists and their professional advisers.
As the early eugenicist Raymond Pearl wrote in 1912 before he experienced a complete
reversal in his guiding ideology, “[h]itherto everybody except the scientist has had a
chance at directing the course of human evolution. In the eugenics movement an earnest
attempt is being made to show that science is the only safe guide in respect to the most
fundamental of social problems.” 136 The ERO invoked principles of scientific
management on two levels: planning of marriages, for which the thousands of index cards
133
Ibid., 4.
Harry Laughlin, “The Eugenics Record Office at the End of Twenty-Seven Months Work,”
Report of the Eugenics Record Office, 1 (1913): 1.
134
135
Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor,” 258-59.
136
Raymond Pearl, “First International Eugenics Congress,” Science 36 (1912): 395-96.
72
housed at the facility could be used; and social legislation and education through
programs designed to reduce the number of “defectives” in the U.S. 137
The efficiency of the eugenics design was likewise a dominant feature of the
ERO’s vision. In 1914 Harry Laughlin wrote:
Eugenics, which Davenport defines as “the improvement of the human race by
better breeding” is one of these agencies of social betterment, which in its
practical application would greatly promote human welfare, but which if
neglected would cause racial, and consequently social degradation. Eugenics,
then, is the warp in the fabric of national efficiency and perpetuity. As an art it is
as old as mankind; as a science it is just now taking definitive form. 138
As dictated by the medical model, science applied to societal ills focused on
isolating the origin of the problem, not on treating the resulting symptoms or societal
interpretations of the supposed pathology. The older, more traditional solutions for the
socially and economically oppressed included varies types of charities, that, as has been
noted, Davenport vehemently opposed. A science-driven approach, reasoned Davenport,
dictated cutting off “the springs that feed the torrent of defectives and degenerate
protoplasm.” 139 In addition, the role of the cult of efficiency in the functioning of the
ERO was not merely implicit. In a 1930 issue of the Birmingham Mail, an unsigned
article titled “Rationalising Mankind: Big Business Methods in Evolution: Eugenic
Reform,” detailed a British eugenics meeting that convened to discuss the application of
business methods to human evolution. 140 The article was in a folder, the label of which
has been authenticated as Laughlin’s handwriting. Although Laughlin left no personal
137
Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor,” 259.
Harry H. Laughlin, “Report of the Committee to Study Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the
Defective Germ-Plasm in the American Population,” Bull. Eugen. Rec. Off. 10 (1914): 100.
138
139
Davenport, Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding, 4.
140
“Rationalising Mankind: Big Business Methods in Evolution: Eugenic Reform” Birmingham
Mail, Birmingham, England, July 7, 1930.
73
notes or commentary in relation to the article, in light of the ERO’s objectives and
campaigns, his approval of the comparison may be assumed. The article, taken with the
fact that Laughlin specifically saved it and set it apart demonstrates that at least some
early eugenicists saw the relationship between their agenda and the broader mandates of
progressive-oriented solutions to economic and social problems. 141
The objectives of eugenicists and progressives mirrored those of the wealthy and
their professional managers and advisers. Both the Harriman and the Carnegie
philanthropies focused on what Mary Harriman identified as “efficient giving.” 142 This
required appropriating philanthropic funds directed toward locating the origin of the
perceived social or economic ill that necessitated a cure or outright eradication. It also
implied using funds to introduce organization and order into the research process itself by
emphasizing cooperation and the establishment of formal research institutions. As
contrasted with private donors, foundations played a pivotal role in funneling the
concerns of the wealthy elite into concrete, scientifically-backed research pursuits, or into
ventures designed to facilitate social planning and control. In a memorandum to the
Foundation’s Board in 1914, Columbia University economist and adviser to the
Rockefeller Foundation Wesley Clair explicitly drew the connection between science and
social control: “Just as science affords the chief means of improving the practice of
medicine, so science affords the chief means of improving the practices of social
regulation.” 143 Concerns about order, efficiency, rational planning, and expert
141
Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor,” 259-260.
142
Ibid., 260.
143
Harry H. Laughlin, Europe as an Emigrant-Exporting Continent and the United States as an
Emigrant-Receiving Nation, Report of the U.S. Congress House Committee on Immigration and
Naturalization (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Press, 1924): 1235.
74
management were common to middle class individuals, high profile eugenicists, and the
wealthy elite and their professional advisers.
Although paternalistic and oppressive in its application to a variety of historically
marginalized economic and social groups, eugenics must be viewed within the context of
progressive era ideals and objectives. The former capitalized on the widespread appeal of
social betterment that many reformers believed could be achieved through the application
of scientific principles to economic and social problems. As a movement, eugenics
gained momentum and thrived in the U.S. in the early twentieth century because of the
active and ongoing support of both professionals and ordinary citizens. It is conceivable
that the movement would have remained in its embryonic form had it only received the
support of the government and not the additional backing of professional and private
interest groups. 144 As evidence of its heterogeneous nature, the movement drew support
from social conservatives who aimed to preserve their status and to prevent the
proliferation of the lower classes. As U.S. historian Daniel J. Kelves explained, “[t]he
progressives and the conservatives found common ground in attributing phenomena such
as crime, slums, prostitution, and alcoholism primarily to biology and in believing that
biology might be used to eliminate these discordances of modern, urban industrial
society.” 145 In a period that saw the decline of a laissez-faire political, social, and
economic philosophy, and the simultaneous advancement of scientific management and
social control, eugenics was advanced as a potential cure for a variety of societal ills. By
gaining the support of prominent persons and legitimate institutions, eugenicists
144
Thomas C. Leonard, “Retrospectives: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era,” The
Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 4 (2005): 208-210.
145
435.
Daniel J. Kelves, “Eugenics and Human Rights,” British Medical Journal 319, no. 207 (1999):
75
exploited the social and economic upheaval occasioned by mass industrialization,
urbanization, and immigration. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
witnessed numerous attempts on the part of reform-minded individuals and groups to
correct what they viewed as problems in the U.S. Early eugenicists capitalized on and
exploited the widespread desire for order, efficiency, expert knowledge and rational
planning.
Earlier studies of eugenics focused on the movement’s application to race, socioeconomic status, and the forced sterilization of the feebleminded. However, the
segregationist aspect of the eugenics design in the U.S. brought with it damaging policies
toward individuals with physical and mental disabilities. The central goal of the eugenics
agenda was to cleanse society of specified economic and social ills by preventing
procreation among the undesirable classes which would in turn create economically
productive, and therefore valuable adult citizens. By analyzing the history of the
eugenics movement and the progressive ideals of order and efficiency it becomes clear
that the same motivations that prompted eugenics-oriented race relations and socioeconomic campaigns led to the rigid segregation of students who were visually impaired
or blind in the U.S.
76
Chapter 3
Reforms in the General Education System during
the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
The segregationist prong of the eugenics design in the U.S. brought with it
damaging policies toward individuals with disabilities. The impact of the broad scale
subscription to eugenic rhetoric and practice as applied to marginalized social groups was
evident in all facets of society. It was particularly evident in the movement’s application
to the development of the special education system in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Separation of disabled students, whether in the form of outright
exclusion in the residential state schools, or segregation in isolated sight-saving
classrooms in common schools in urban areas, was a eugenics-oriented design. It
implicated a classification and sorting system that utilized economic productivity as an
assertedly objective measure of value and desirability. This scheme allowed for
differentiation in the education system between the deserving and the undeserving in the
extension of the full rights and benefits of U.S. citizenship.
The end of a desirable citizenry was achieved through the outright exclusion of
students with disabilities, and then through segregated classrooms in common schools
following states’ enactment of compulsory attendance statutes. Like other states, Ohio
did not eliminate its exclusionary practices following the passage of its compulsory
attendance law. Rather it shifted the form of differentiation and classification to intra77
district segregation in the form of sight-saving classes. Special education
institutionalized the idea of the “undesirable” student. Segregated classrooms provided a
vehicle to continue the tracking system that predetermined which students were likely to
mature into economic contributors to the expanding industrial state, and therefore
desirable and deserving of the full rights and benefits of U.S. citizenship.
Administrators and teachers aimed to preserve traditional notions of order and
efficiency in the common schools by utilizing back door arrangements to segregate
undesirable students. The establishment and evolution of segregated sight-saving classes
ensured that students who were believed to be incapable of becoming productive, and
therefore valuable and desirable citizens due to their status as visually impaired or blind
would remain on a separate track. By establishing special education classes, school
districts appeared to embrace the progressive measure of deinstitutionalization, and at the
same time ensured the continued viability of the status of undesirability, and allowed
teachers to promote the progressive ideals of order and efficiency. This chapter analyzes
the changes in the general education system in the U.S. during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries to demonstrate the primacy of a solid education, changes in the
curricula to embody the nation’s shift to a thriving industrial order in need of
economically productive citizens, and the centrality of the dual aims of order and
efficiency that facilitated the establishment of segregated sight-saving classes.
Long hailed a universal symbol of democracy, the proper role and function of
public schools lay at the heart of intense and protracted controversies and debates at the
end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. As U.S. socialist, Victor
L. Berger wrote in the Milwaukee Leader in 1915, “two ideas are fighting for mastery in
78
the educational world.” 1 Two diametrically opposed intellectually, socially, and
philosophically informed views contended for primacy. The more traditional view,
Berger cautioned, was orchestrated by capitalists and “would make the schools into
‘efficient,’ card catalogued, time clocked, well bossed factories for the manufacture of
standardized wage slaves.” At the opposite end of the continuum was a movement led by
political radicals and so-called progressive citizens. This, Berger explained, “would have
the schools a part of our social life, specialized to hasten the development of children into
free human beings.” 2 This brand of pedagogical reform reflected a fundamental
departure in the view of the role of public schools in the face of a rapidly changing
economic and social order. 3
Instead of molding education to mirror, reflect, and cater to the privileged classes,
the latter philosophy viewed schools as part of the broad social and social landscape
designed to expedite students’ maturation into autonomous, self-sufficient, economically
productive, and therefore valuable citizens. From kindergarten to the university, these
contradictory views clashed and competed for recognition and adoption. 4 Out of this
struggle, Berger observed, “America’s modern public school system would emerge
replete with the contradictions of the larger capitalist society.” 5
1
Victor L. Berger, Milwaukee Leader, 6 March 1915, p. 3.
2
Ibid.
3
William J. Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements During the
Progressive Era (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002), xix.
4
Ibid.
5
Berger, Milwaukee Leader, 3.
79
As William J. Reese, professor of educational policy explained; “efficiency verses
democracy, freedom versus control, respect for labor versus power for the capitalists:
these were the many conflicts that citizens confronted on the shop floor as well as in the
local neighborhood school.” 6 In contrast to school administrators who viewed education
as above politics, most lay persons saw public schools as political institutions. Socialists
and non-socialists, trade unions and manufacturers, educational theorists and experts, and
lay citizens all recognized the centrality of public schools in the development of
economically productive, and therefore desirable citizens. As a result, “the power to
influence the curriculum, to select textbooks, to appoint teachers, or to inaugurate
innovative programs depended upon political strength, not matter what school
superintendents with their advanced degrees proclaimed.” 7
The end of the nineteenth and opening decades of the twentieth centuries
witnessed a mass expansion and transformation in immigration law and policy,
urbanization, and industrialization. The question of how to reorganize state-funded and
directed education in response was paramount to contemporary reformers. 8 Berger and
his contemporaries understood the importance of open public debates about school
policy. 9 However, a general consensus on the role of education as a prescriptive tool in
promoting the development of a productive citizenry did not result in a uniform theory or
a streamlined implementation of the design. Rather, as Reese pointed out, “public
6
Reese, Power and the Promise of Schools Reform, xix.
7
Ibid., 7-8.
8
Norman H. Nie, Jan Junn, and Kenneth Stehlik-Barry, Education and Democratic Citizenship in
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996): 13.
9
Nie, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America, 13; Reese, Power and the Promise of
School Reform, 42; Berger, Milwaukee Leader, 3.
80
schools symbolized many different things to various citizens during the period.” 10
Although there was mass enthusiasm for reform efforts, marked disagreements
surrounding substantive and procedural curriculum innovations and modifications
persisted. The following illustrations are instructive. In the view of one banker sitting on
the Milwaukee Board of Education in 1910, school reorganization should represent and
mirror business practice, structure, and ethics in a system where teachers were hired for
the explicit purpose of instilling American values into the future labor force. 11 In
contrast, to members of many middle-class women’s organizations schools served
primarily humanitarian functions that sponsored free breakfasts and lunches for the poor,
basic medical and dental care, and safe playgrounds. 12 Progressive radicals and their
trade union allies viewed public schools as continually evolving democratic forums that
“nevertheless required vigilance and continual protection from the serpentine arms of
manufacturers and capitalists.” 13
In the face of the heterogenic character of reform-centered ideology, any
discussion of educational policy and reorganization must explore these divergent
philosophies. Reformers from all political and social orientations sought to impose their
views and values upon the nation’s schools. No matter which view prevailed in a
particular region, schools served to socialize students and educate them in the basic
subjects, but were under the constant control and direction of prominent leaders in the
10
Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform, 32.
11
Berger, Milwaukee Leader, 5.
12
Edward W. Stevens, Jr. “Social Centers, Politics, and Social Efficiency in the Progressive Era,”
History of Education Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1972): 17.
13
Clarence J. Karier, “Elite Views on American Education,” Journal of Contemporary History 2,
no. 3 (1967): 151.
81
community. 14 The heart of the debate loosely labeled “educational policy” centered on
the question of whose values would dominate in the public schools, not on whether the
imposition of values, beliefs, and curriculum control would occur. 15 This ensured that
from the economic depression of the early 1890s to the Red Scare and resulting Palmer
Raids that shook the nation between 1919 and 1920, public schools were a largely
“contested terrain.” 16
In 1870 few people could have predicted the evolution and resulting contours of
the pedagogical design that endured for the next sixty years, but the defining features of
twentieth-century education policy slowly took shape among the conflicts and
controversies that pulsated through the era. By 1930, urban schools in the U.S. had
signed on to numerous experiments that gained ascendency among educators and lay
citizens alike by sporting lofty promises of transforming the character of education. 17 A
diverse mix of voluntary associations in hundreds of cities throughout the nation
coalesced into local reform-driven movements and demanded that schools assume
unprecedented responsibilities. The once sharp distinction between public and private
duties blurred. Whether or not contemporary theorists and educators accepted Berger’s
assertion that U.S. schools were thrust into a larger debate between capitalists and
14
Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform, 77.
15
Julius Yourman, “Community Coordination—The Next Movement in Education,” Journal of
Educational Sociology 9, no. 6 (1936): 328.
16
Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth
Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
17
Robert L. Church, “Educational Psychology and Social Reform in the Progressive Era,” History
of Education Quarterly 11, no. 4 (1971): 397.
82
democratic reformers, educators and lay citizens both acknowledged that the education
system witnessed a marked departure from earlier trends and practices. 18
Education reform, although inherently heterogeneous in its character and scope,
was of major concern to cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Interest in educational innovation and reform was revitalized following the Panic of
1893. Although the depression lasted approximately four years, the social consciousness
that it engendered persisted for decades. 19 Reformers realized that emerging industrial
designs and practices had their counterpart in the reorganization of public schools. With
the elimination of ward-level representation, school boards became centralized.
Superintendants were entrusted with greater powers, thereby decreasing the role of
ordinary citizens. 20 At the same time, citizen groups pushed to make public schools more
responsive to children from all socio-economic ranks. Established in large part to
mitigate against the effects of the business and elite-backed reforms that reflected
centralized power and control, grassroots progressive reformers did not analogize schools
to capital investment, nor did they equate children with human capital. 21
As U.S. historian Arthur M. Schlesinger observed, “[t]he closing decades of the
[nineteenth] century saw an educational renaissance comparable in many respects to the
18
Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform, 36-43.
19
Patricia A. Graham, Community and Class in American Education, 1865-1918 (New York:
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1974): 81-94.
20
William H. Jeynes, American Educational History: School, Society, and the Common Good
(Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2007): 182-184.
21
Stevens, “Social Centers, Politics, and Social Efficiency in the Progressive Era,” 24-26.
83
great days of Horace Mann and Henry Barnard.” 22 Many commentators have described
this rebirth of the education system in the U.S. and its wide sweep and enduring effects.
Historians have long attempted to analyze this phenomenon by focusing on the
emergence of the high school. To this end, they described the multitude of urbanoriented education issues and problems and applied political and social progressivism. In
addition, they evaluated the growth and differentiation of colleges and universities.
Scholars of education in the U.S. traditionally focused on the expansion and increasingly
significant role of formal schooling. 23 “The great days of Horace Mann and Henry
Barnard” that Schlesinger identified were the mid-1800s when Mann and Barnard
instituted public school systems in Massachusetts and Connecticut, respectively. This
period was often described as “the age of the common school.” 24 As U.S. education
historian Patricia Graham observed, for Massachusetts and Connecticut this
characterization was fair, but for a sizeable part of the nation it was grossly inaccurate.
Significantly, this New England-styled reform impulse pushed through the rest of the
country only after the Civil War. The inescapable regionally-based focus of the MannBarnard period is notable for that reason. 25
Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era have long debated issues of
definition and periodization. These debates are detailed in a later chapter. Here, it is
enough to outline in general terms the issue of whether a unified, cohesive progressive
22
Arthur Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1998), 2.
23
Graham, Community and Class in American Education, 1865-1918, 3.
24
Ibid., 14.
25
Ibid., 4-7.
84
movement existed in the U.S. Predictably, scholars on the one hand call into question the
utility and desirability of strict labels and eschew the claim that a movement subject to a
single, uniform characterization ever evolved. For example, in his 1961 book, The
Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957, U.S.
historian Lawrence Cremin avoided a definition entirely. 26 Other scholars acknowledged
the divergent nature of the reform movements, but argued there was a cohesive
overarching impulse toward progress, advancement, and social betterment. Histories of
education, though not without debate, have reached a general consensus of the
significance of this period as marking mass change in the urban schools of the nation.
Stated differently, scholars agreed that this period witnessed dramatic changes in the
philosophical, pedagogical, and administrative structures of the education system as a
whole. 27 As U.S. historian Arthur Zilversmit explained in his 1993 work, Changing
Schools: Progressive Education Theory and Practice, 1930-1960:
In arriving at a definition, it is important to recognize that progressive education
was only one of several contemporary educational reform movements. Each was
an effort to adapt education to a nation that was being transformed by
industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. As Americans faced these major
challenges, many hoped schools could play a role in helping the nation cope with
rapid change. 28
The progressive education movement was an integral part of the broader reform
impulse directed toward the reassertion of democracy through social, economic, and
political change. If implemented correctly, reformers argued, shifts in educational policy
promised to minimize the upheaval in U.S. society occasioned by the intense social,
26
Cremin, The Transformation of the School, 12-13.
27
John Rury, Education and Social Change: Themes in the History of American Schooling
(Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2005), 146-148.
28
Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 3.
85
economic, and political changes ushered in by the forces of modernity. The altered
political, economic, and social landscape in the country, reformers contended, provided
schools with unprecedented opportunities and responsibilities to play a leading role in
shaping and molding students into economically productive citizens capable of active
civic participation in a thriving industrial order. 29
Crowned the "Father of Progressive Education" by the New York Times following
his death in 1952, John Dewey was arguably the most prolific and most influential figure
in educational reform. 30 From approximately 1890 onward, Dewey began to question
traditional modes of education, and advocated a radical departure from past designs and
practices. His work was well received in an era that boasted a liberal leaning toward
reform. Dewey was credited with spawning a movement in U.S. education that promised
the emergence of schools informed by democratic ideals rather than authoritarian
regiments from centuries past. 31 In short, he called for a radical departure from earlier
pedagogical designs that emphasized rote memorization and recitation in favor of
learning based on experience and action. By questioning the vitality of traditional
practices in the face of the expanding discourse on democratic theory, Dewey and his
contemporaries sought to transform schools into “humane institutions that respected
childhood, and they hoped that the children who were educated in these schools, would,
as adults, create a better society.” 32
29
Nie, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America, 73-85.
30
“Dr. John Dewey Dead at 92; Philosopher a Noted Liberal.” The New York Times June 2, 1952.
31
Nie, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America, 12.
32
Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 2.
86
A respected philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, Dewey authored
over 1,000 books and articles on topics ranging from politics to art. 33 For all of his
scholarly eclecticism, however, his work never deviated too far from his primary
intellectual pursuit: education. Taken together, The School and Society, The Child and
the Curriculum, and Democracy and Education, outlined a revolutionary reformulation of
education theory and practice based upon the symbiotic relationship he argued existed
between democratic ideals and schools. 34 Dewey's prescription for U.S. schools was
inextricably tied to his broader vision of a well adjusted society as a whole. He
conceptualized the educational process as an intentioned pursuit and practice of
investigation, problem solving, and personal and community development central to a
democratic state. 35 Because each classroom represented a microcosm of the human
relationships that made up the broader community, Dewey believed that the school
functioned as a "little democracy," and could operate to create a "more lovely society."
For Dewey and his followers, the classroom itself represented a microsm of the larger
macrosm of a democratic society. 36
In a series of lectures known collectively as “The School and Society and the
Child and the Curriculum,” Dewey outlined his philosophy and its objectives. 37 Because
he admittedly was influenced by Charles Darwin’s work, Dewey described the aims of
33
Nie, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America, 17.
34
Dewey, The School and Society, Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum, Dewey, Democracy
and Education.
35
Dewey, Democracy and Education, 12-15.
36
Ibid., 7-15.
37
Dewey, The School and Society, 32-37.
87
education in “naturalistic” terms as ongoing individual growth both physically and
mentally. 38 According to Dewey, the child should be viewed as a highly evolved
“organism,” not simply as a distinct mind. 39 As a result, “schools should recognize that
the care and growth of the body are just as important as the development of the mind.” 40
This, Dewey observed, demanded a recognition that each child was unique, and as such
they learn through different techniques and at different rates. 41 The end objective of the
cultivation of the individual as a whole presupposed a respect for the status of childhood
and for the activities inherent to that position. In other words, Dewey viewed childhood
as an end in itself, not simply a stepping stone in the evolutionary process toward
adulthood. In his words, “if we identify ourselves with the real instincts and needs of
childhood, and ask only after its fullest assertion and growth, the discipline and
information and culture of adult life shall all come in their due season.” 42
In “The School and Society,” Dewey stressed that each student entered school
possessing a number of distinct and unique traits. As he explained, each individual
student has “an interest in . . . communication; in finding out things; in making things, . .
.and in artistic expression.” 43 Dewey described these characteristics as “the natural
resources . . . upon the exercise of which depends the active growth of the child.” 44
38
Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 3.
39
Dewey, The School and Society, 36-44.
40
John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey, Schools of To-Morrow (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1915), 170.
41
Ibid., 171-172.
42
Dewey, The School and Society, 60.
43
Ibid., 47-48.
44
Ibid., 48.
88
When a student lacked a natural tendency toward “abstract inquiry,” that child often
exhibits a “constructive impulse” and an “art instinct.” 45 Education, then, should be
viewed as an active progression that utilized the child’s “native curiosity.” 46 Schools
could capitalize on the abilities and perceptions that students brought to the classroom
from the outside world, but a more viable alternative, Dewey argued, would be for a child
to “leave his mind behind, because there is no way to use it in school. If he had a purely
abstract mind, he could bring it to school with him, but his is a concrete mind, interested
in concrete things.” 47 For Dewey, progressive education involved learning that was
achieved when schools acknowledged and involved the child’s natural interests and
native curiosity. He did not suggest, however, that the teacher was a passive observer to
nature’s direction of the child. Rather, the teacher played a vital role in molding their
development into economically and socially productive citizens in a democratic society.
In his words, “[t]hrough direction, the child’s interests tend toward valuable results,
instead of scattering or being left to merely impulsive expression.” 48
Dewey explicitly coupled his “new education” with broader expressions of
political, social, and economic change in the nation. To this end, he developed the notion
of the school as the “legatee” institution. 49 It was charged with spearheading and
organizing functions that had previously been left to institutions rendered ineffective in
the face of the emerging industrial order. Dewey maintained that under the traditional
45
Dewey, “Progressive Education and the Science of Education,” 197.
46
Dewey, The School and Society, 44.
47
Ibid., 80.
48
Ibid.
49
Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 63-67.
89
“household and neighborhood system [that was rapidly disintegrating] the entire
industrial process stood revealed.” 50 As a result, the responsibility for future learning and
molding of desirable character traits necessarily fell to other institutions. In light of the
changes ushered in by the forces of modernity, “only an equally radical change in
education [would suffice]. The school would have to assume new functions; its
curriculum would have to encompass much more than the three R’s.” 51
Although Dewey repeatedly emphasized the importance of the growth and
development of students into productive citizens in a rapidly industrializing order, he did
not view this as the sole or even primary purpose of progressive-era schools. He did not
restrict the benefits of personal advancement and development to the individual child or
his or her future. 52 The molding of the individual student was necessary to ensure the
continued safety and vitality of the state. This theme ran consistently through his
writings over time. Dewey often described the new school as “an embryonic
community.” 53 In his oft-cited articulation of the process Dewey stated that, “when the
school introduces and trains each child into membership within such a little community,
saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of
effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guaranty of a larger society
50
Dewey, The School and Society, 36.
51
Ibid., 9-10.
52
Clarence J. Karier, “Liberal Ideology and the Quest for Orderly Change,” in Roots of Crisis:
American Education in the Twentieth Century, ed. Clarence J. Karier, Paula Violas, and Joel Spring
(Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1973), 87.
53
Dewey, The School and Society; Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum; Dewey, Democracy
and Education.
90
which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious.” 54 Public schools served as vehicles to bring
order and stability to a rapidly industrializing society in the face of widespread political,
economic, and social change. The strictly guarded twin pillars of order and stability
allowed administrators and teachers to mold students into economically productive, and
therefore valuable citizens.
By emphasizing the importance of democratic relationships in the classroom,
Dewey necessarily shifted the focus of education from the institution itself to the needs of
individual students. Dewey cannot receive exclusive credit for this departure from
traditional pedagogical theory. His focus on child-centered educational practices was
shared by other progressive educators and researchers like Ella Flagg Young, and the
iconoclastic Clark University psychologist and avowed leader of the child study
movement Granville Stanley Hall. 55 Collectively, they developed and perfected the
child-centeredness approach by interrogating a wide array of nineteenth and twentiethcentury European and American philosophical works. The philosophies that Dewey and
like-minded theorists invoked simultaneously deified childhood and advanced claims of
social and intellectual interdependence. 56 First, the French philosopher Jean Jacques
Rousseau emphasized its organic and natural contours; while English literary romantics
like William Wordsworth and William Blake stood in awe of its innate purity and piety.
The latter characterization would be shared by U.S. transcendentalists Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. For these theorists, childhood was a period of
54
Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum, 24.
James L. Nolan, Jr., The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century’s End (New
York: New York University Press, 1998); 152-161.
55
56
John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 56-62.
91
innocence, goodness, grace, and piety that was undoubtedly superior in every way to the
polluted lives of most adults. It was the sanctity of childhood that convinced romantics
and transcendentalists that the ideas embodied in the status of childhood should be
preserved, cultivated, and molded through formal education. 57
Second, Dewey and his contemporaries relied heavily on the work of the German
philosopher Friedrich Froebel and the Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi. Froebel and
Pestalozzi were among the first to explain the process and benefits of educating the
"whole child.” 58 Learning moved beyond a mastery of basic subjects and traditional
modes of assessment and focused instead on the needs and interests of the individual
student. Focusing on both the students’ mind and being, they believed, was the true
business of education in the U.S. In line with general progressive ideology, they looked
for an empirical and rational science of education to draw upon that would incorporate
these foundational principles and legitimize the shift in pedagogical theories and
practices. 59 Froebel developed a metaphor in which education was the garden, students
were the crops, and teachers were charged with cultivating students in a linear
progression to maturity. In addition, his writings provided the European foundations for
the late-nineteenth-century kindergarten movement in the U.S. 60 In a similar vein,
Pestalozzi popularized the technique of object teaching. This involved the educator
57
Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 21-27.
58
Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum, 14-17; Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 25-27.
59
Nie, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America, 37-42.
60
Friedrich Froebel, Pedagogics of the Kindergarten: Or His Ideas Concerning the Play and
Playthings of the Child (New York: D. Appleton, 1896).
92
beginning the lesson with an object that related to the child's experiences outside the
classroom to draw the student into the teacher’s frame of reference. 61
Third, Dewey drew inspiration from the ideas of U.S. philosopher and
psychologist William James. Dewey's subsequent interpretation of James’ philosophical
pragmatism, a design that was remarkably similar to the ideas underlying Pestalozzi's
object teaching, joined thinking and doing as two seamlessly connected halves of the
learning process. 62 By focusing on the relationship between thought and action, Dewey
believed his philosophy of education and resulting design would equip each child with
the problem-solving skills necessary to overcome the obstacles between a problem
presented and the desired outcome. Taken together, these European and U.S.-based
philosophical traditions encouraged and assisted progressives in connecting education to
individual value and desirability by assessing productivity, and therefore the deserving
versus the undeserving in terms of full citizenship rights. 63 Children, if taught to
understand the relationship between thought and subsequent action, would have all the
skills necessary for active participation in a democratic order. It was for these reasons
that the education reform movement in the progressive era ultimately broke from
traditional pedagogies organized around antiquated and antidemocratic methods of drill,
discipline, and didactic repetitions. 64
61
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, The Art of Human Education (New York: Continuum, 1996 ed.).
62
William James, “Lecture 6: Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” (New York: Longman Green
and Company, 1907); 76-91.
63
Dewey, Democracy and Education, 14-19.
64
Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 48-49.
93
Progressives who embraced a child-centered approach to education argued in
favor of a system built on an experience-based curriculum developed by both students
and teachers. Teachers were called upon to merge their knowledge of, and affection for
children with the intellectual demands of the subjects taught. Dewey, while admittedly
antiauthoritarian in his approach, did not understand child-centered curriculum and
pedagogy to mean the wholesale abandonment of the traditional substantive subjects or
instructional guidance and control. 65 He criticized theories that viewed education as a
source of entertainment, or as an embodiment of rote vocationalism. 66 Motivated by a
desire to reaffirm and further democratic ideals, Dewey's time- and resource-exhaustive
educational design depended on close student–teacher interactions that, he argued,
required nothing less than total reorganization of the core subjects and their mode of
presentation. 67
Although pure Deweyism was rare in its practical implementation, Dewey’s basic
ideas were employed by both private and public school systems. During his tenure as
head of the department of philosophy at the University of Chicago, Dewey, along with
his wife Alice established a University Laboratory School (Lab School). Self-described
as a center for educational experimentation, the Lab School sought to prioritize the role
of practical experience and hands-on learning. 68 For Dewey, education should be
targeted toward growth, and the school would play a vital role in creating an environment
65
Ibid., 45-46.
66
Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum, 101.
67
Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 12.
68
Ibid., 27-31.
94
that was conducive to meeting the child's needs and interests, and would allow them to
develop the skills necessary to become productive citizens in a thriving industrial state.
Similarly, U.S. educational theorist Colonel Francis W. Parker, Dewey’s
contemporary and a devout follower of Emerson espoused a deep respect and admiration
for the beauty and wonder of nature. He prized the happiness of the individual over all
else and acknowledged a central link between education and real-world experience. 69
During his tenure as superintendent in Quincy, Massachusetts, and later as the head of the
Cook Country Normal School in Chicago, Parker rejected discipline, authority,
regimentation, and traditional pedagogical techniques in general. Instead, he emphasized
warmth, spontaneity, and the joy of learning. 70 Both Dewey and Parker believed in
learning through action. They argued that genuine delight, rather than drudgery, should
be the object of education. By linking the home and school, and by conceptualizing both
as integral parts of a larger community, educators sought to create an environment in
which children could see the connection between their work and the advancement and
perfection of society as a whole.
Although the study of education during the progressive era often focused on
private independent schools such as Dewey's Lab School, Margaret Naumberg's Walden
School, and Lincoln School of Teacher's College, progressive ideas were also
implemented in large urban public school systems. The most well known were in
Winnetka, Illinois, and Gary, Indiana. Located approximately twenty miles north of
downtown Chicago on its affluent North Shore, the Winnetka schools, under the
69
Francis W. Parker, Talks on Pedagogics: An Outline of the Theory of Concentration (New
York: A.S. Barnes, 1891). 24-31.
70
Rury, Education and Social Change, 151-157.
95
leadership of superintendent Carleton Washburne, rejected traditional practices in favor
of individualized instruction that encouraged children to learn at their own pace. 71
Washburne and his staff believed that all children had a right to be happy and live full,
natural lives, and they, like Dewey connected the needs of the individual to those of the
greater community. To this end, they focused on the child's natural curiosity in the
classroom and developed a teacher education program at the Graduate Teachers College
of Winnetka to train teachers in this approach. The Winnetka schools balanced
progressive ideals with basic skills and academic expectations.
The Gary school system was also a progressive pursuit. Its superintendent,
William A. Wirt studied with Dewey at the University of Chicago. The Gary school
system attracted national attention for its platoon and work-study-play systems. They
increased the capacity of the schools, and at the same time allowed students to spend a
sizeable portion of their time doing hands-on work in laboratories, shops, and on the
playground. 72 Schools remained open into the evenings and offered community-based
adult education courses. By facilitating learning through action, and by adopting a
program that focused on broader social and community needs, the Winnetka and Gary
school districts mirrored Dewey's theories about the proper role of education. 73
Although Dewey was the most well known and influential progressive educator
and theorist, he was not representative of the full ideological spectrum of the
transformation of education. In the face of turn-of-the-century reform efforts, the idea of
71
Ibid., 25-37.
72
Ibid., 42-58.
73
Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 7.
96
educational progressivism took on multiple, and often contradictory meanings. 74 While
Dewey and his disciples rejected traditional methods of instruction and gravitated instead
toward a "new education" 75 based on the interests and needs of the individual child, a
new class of professionally trained school administrators also justified their new policies
in the name of progressive education. 76
Progressives who were more oriented toward the administrative approach to
reform shared Dewey's distaste for the education system of the nineteenth-century, but
they differed markedly in their prescription for its reorganization. Reformers who
opposed Dewey’s approach did so primarily on ideological and philosophical grounds.
They sought to overturn the "bookish" and rigid schooling definitive of the nineteenth
century by creating what they believed to be useful, efficient, and centralized systems of
public education based on vertically integrated bureaucracies, curricular differentiation,
and standardized testing. 77 In their quest to justify a complete overhaul of the existing
system, they drew analogies to business enterprises and frequently invoked the inherently
fluid concepts of rational planning, expertise, and efficiency. As Zilversmit explained,
these reformers were:
Primarily concerned with applying principles of efficiency, centralization, and
bureaucratic decision making, based on the example of modern business, to the
schools. They deplored the conventional curriculum as inefficient. They called
for testing and standardization. At the same time, they wanted to rescue urban
schools from hopelessly inefficient and corrupt ward politics. 78
74
Nie, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America, 12.
75
Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum, 22.
76
Nie, Education and Democratic Citizenship in America, 42-49.
77
Ibid., 73-74.
78
Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 2.
97
School administrators relied on managerial expertise to efficiently supervise
increasingly large public school districts. Employing the language and practices of
efficiency developed by experts like Frederick W. Taylor, administrators attempted to
rationalize disparate school districts within one hierarchically arranged system of primary
and secondary institutions. 79 Powerful school boards, often comprised of elite business
and civic leaders, employed professionally trained superintendents to implement policies
and to oversee day-to-day operations. The superintendent, usually a male, divorced
himself from the teachers and students. In the name of efficiency, superintendents relied
on "scientific "personnel management techniques that were developed by and for private
industry. They transplanted these methods to the education system through businessfriendly school boards and graduate training at newly formed and endowed schools of
higher education. 80
Schools’ shift toward bureaucratic efficiency directly shaped the substantive
contours of the curriculum. The concept of differentiation became a new catchphrase
among reformers who followed an administrative-centered approach to reorganization of
the nation’s education system. 81 It reflected emerging economic and social status
markers denoted by the attainment of higher educational credentials. By differentiating
79
James L. Nolan, Jr., The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century’s End (New
York: New York University Press, 1998), 152-163.
80
Ibid.
81
Terman, Lewis M., The Measurement of Intelligence: An Explanation of and a
Complete Guide for the Use of the Stanford Revision and Extension of the Binet-Simon
Intelligence Scale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916); Terman, Lewis M. et al., Intelligence Tests
and School Reorganization (Yonkers, N.Y.: World Book, 1923); Leila Zenderland, Measuring
Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 114.
98
the curriculum along academic and vocational tracks, administrators attempted to meet
the needs of different classes and calibers of students and to securely tie scholastic
training to measurable outcomes.
82
Although administrators justified tracking on the
claim of equal opportunity for all students based on ability, it reflected a more significant
shift in the aims and objectives of education in the U.S. Schools once provided
intellectual and moral instruction. However, in the face of an increasingly diverse
student population, administrators now viewed their primary responsibility to be molding
students for their future lives as productive workers in the labor force and therefore
worthy recipients of full citizenship rights. 83
Standardized testing in primary and secondary schools marked its ascendency in
the context of multiple heterogeneous reform movements, the professionalization of
psychology, the increasing application of Taylor’s theories of mechanization and order to
schools, and a heightened deference to scientific expertise, efficiency, and rational
planning. 84 Although many of these factors overlapped in their underlying rationales, the
political, social, and economic landscape that emerged provided educators and
policymakers with a device to deal with the increasing number of students in the face of
mass immigration and the introduction of state compulsory attendance laws. This
interplay visibly highlighted the problems of lack of accountability and inefficiency. It
82
Julius Yourman, “Community Coordination—The Next ‘Movement’ in Education”
Journal of Educational Sociology 9, no. 6 (1936): 327-330; Travers, Robert W. How Research
has Changed American Schools: A History from 1840 to the Present (Kalamazoo, Mich: Mythos
Press, 1983).
83
Willis Rudy, Schools in an Age of Mass Culture: An Exploration of Selected Themes in
the History of Twentieth-Century American Education (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1965),
1-4; Rury, Education and Social Change, 16.
84
Frederick Mayer, American Ideas and Education (Columbus, Ohio: C.E. Merrill
Books, 1964), 67
99
also prescribed remedial measures through scientific expertise that restructured education
in large urban centers by claiming to be able to prospectively determine a student’s
intelligence and propensity for achievement through standardized tests. As a result,
students were placed on differentiated learning tracks. 85
United States historian Stephen Jay Gould’s 1981 book, The Mismeasure of Man
highlighted the heated debates and controversies that surrounded the origins of
intelligence testing. As the title suggests, Gould focused on specific instances where tests
appeared to be benign on their face, but were applied in ways to generate data that
supported the administrator’s racist preconceptions. 86 As the author explained, the
results of these tests were often used to the detriment of marginalized identity categories
of students. As Gould explicitly noted in the introduction, he intended the work to serve
as a caveat for professionals inclined to employ scientific conclusions. According to
Gould, professionals must acknowledge the influence of social and cultural norms and
values on the scientific process. Second, professionals should exercise due diligence to
overcome the deleterious effects of social influences upon science. In Gould’s words,
“science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the
work of robots programmed to collect pure information . . . Science, since people must do
it, is a socially embedded activity.” 87
Some of the controversies that Gould drew attention to included subjective
measurement in nineteenth-century craniology, eugenic influences on hereditarian
85
Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 74-77.
86
Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1981).
87
Ibid., 21.
100
theories of IQ, and manufactured data on separated identical twins to “prove” that
intelligence is genetically transferrable. 88 Through these illustrations, Gould outlined the
ways in which “the allure of numbers” gained increasingly popularity among the human
sciences and allowed proponents of culturally-oriented biased judgments a degree of
scientific backing and legitimacy. The necessarily result-oriented and conclusionary
objective characterization of numbers and statistics obscured general scientific thought
and discourse to the extreme that theorists became wholly unaware of the subjective
influences that plagued their work. As Gould observed, “[t]hey believe in their own
objectivity, and fail to discern the prejudice that leads them to one interpretation among
many consistent with their numbers.” 89 Stated differently, experts fell prey to the myth
of objective numerical interpretation. The theme of the inherent corruptibility of
numerical data reverberated through the scholarship on education and intelligence
testing. 90
In her 1992 book, The Definition of a Profession: The Authority of Metaphor in
the History of Intelligence Testing, 1890-1930, historian JoAnne Brown analyzed how
progressive era psychologists, like Robert Mearns Yerkes, Lewis Madison Terman,
Henry Herbert Goddard, and Edward Lee Thorndike manipulated language in their quest
to assume a position of primacy in the arena of standardized psychological testing. 91
These “professional” psychologists readily cited “scientific objectivity” as the
88
Ibid., 74.
89
Ibid., 106.
90
Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 4-9.
91
JoAnne, Brown, The Definition of a Profession: The Authority of Metaphor in the History of
Intelligence Testing, 1890-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
101
justification for their assertions. But they also employed metaphors taken from
engineering and medicine to legitimize the practices of their evolving profession. Brown
sought to explain the metaphorical strategies that psychologists of the period employed.
By manipulating language and cloaking their assertions with the label of “scientific
objectivity,” psychologists claimed to possess a superior understanding of student
intelligence levels and overall potential, often to the exclusion of teachers who relied on
qualitative descriptions based on first-hand knowledge.
As these psychologists argued, subjective influences burdened teachers and
naturally interfered with the objective evaluation of their students. Psychologists, in
contrast, had numerically-backed scientific studies to support their interpretations. As
Brown explained, “[t]he metaphors of medicine and engineering both established cultural
authority of quantitative methods and universal norms over qualitative methods and
firsthand, local knowledge” 92 Brown argued that the introduction of psychology-based
intelligence tests into U.S. schools was based only in part on the desire for efficiency.
The design was also advanced by psychologists to legitimize and institutionalize their
profession. As Brown pointed out, “Psychologists capitalized upon an increasing trust in
numerical objectivity to cultivate a need for what they professed to offer: objective
measurements of student intelligence.” 93 As educators struggled to retain control over
school policy and the substantive aspects of the curriculum, they endorsed these
techniques as tools to mitigate against practical difficulties of urban public education
92
Ibid., 9.
93
Ibid., 22.
102
brought on by the mass influx of immigrants, compulsory attendance laws, depressed
salaries, and poorly trained teachers.
Because psychologists required ongoing public support and understanding of the
basics of their design in the context of public education to achieve popular acceptance,
they actively avoided technical scientific language. However, at the same time they
needed to assert their unique expertise and authority in the arena of intelligence testing.
As Brown observed, “psychology gained professionalization, in part, by successfully
combining contradictory metaphors of popularity and monopoly.” 94 Psychologists
argued in favor of the use of expert knowledge by drawing metaphors to the practice of
medicine. Similarly, they argued for efficiency coupled with numerically-based studies
by creating metaphors to engineering. Through this combination of selective metaphors,
psychologists secured dominance in the area of education testing. In their view,
psychologists alone possessed the expert knowledge to “manipulate the tests that would
reveal popularly accessible numbers.” 95 Despite the standardization of IQ tests,
psychologists were able to create, based on individual tests, the appearance of an
objective “universal standard.” The mass adoption and popularization of IQ tests
legitimized psychology as a science.
Paul Davis Chapman’s 1988 book, Schools As Sorters: Lewis M. Terman,
Applied Psychology, and the Intelligence Testing Movement, 1890-1930, analyzed the
effects of intelligence testing on school systems in general and on students more
94
Ibid., 13.
95
Ibid., 15-16.
103
specifically. 96 Chapman argued that intelligence testing and the resulting classification
and differentiation of students assisted school districts in finalizing a transformation that
was underway prior to the introduction of these novel pedagogical designs and
practices. 97 As evidence, he cited the shift from the decentralized schools of the early
nineteenth century to the highly structured, differentiated schools that emerged in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Schools As Sorters explored the
introduction of tests into schools, it went beyond a mere recitation of the chronology and
the chief proponents. It also described the ways in which concomitant school
restructuring altered general perceptions of students and the broader objectives of mass,
urban public education. 98
Chapman advanced three reasons for the mass adoption of intelligence testing.
First, the new collaboration of educators, psychologists, and administrators joined forces
with national organizations, philanthropic foundations, and the publishers of standardized
materials to mandate testing for the classification and subsequent differentiation of
students. Second, schools adopted tests to assist with the “administrative and
pedagogical crises” in the context of increased enrollments, diverse student populations,
and compulsory attendance laws. Finally, intelligence tests were squarely in line the core
tenets of progressive era values. As Chapman explained, “[u]niversity professors and
school people alike saw the tests as the logical outgrowth of the progressive quest for
96
Paul Davis Chapman, Schools as Sorters: Lewis M. Terman, Applied Psychology, and the
Intelligence Testing Movement (New York: New York University Press, 1988).
97
Ibid., 3-4.
98
Ibid., 102.
104
efficiency, conservation, and order. The tests were welcomed by people who placed their
trust in the authority of science and the expert.” 99
As a natural corollary of the mass adoption of standardized tests, schools assumed
responsibility for the social function of sorting students and tracking their achievement
under the guise of scientific, rational, and objective policies and procedures. In response
to the differentiation of students, new lines of division were drawn: “Average pupils,
Non-English-speaking Immigrants, Juvenile Delinquents, Feebleminded, Retarded,
Epileptics, Gifted,
Cripple, and so on.” 100 School reorganization was also stimulated by the need to
accommodate newfound variations in student populations, “adding fundamental levels in
elementary school, an intermediate level between elementary school and high school with
some differentiations in courses, junior college, and expanded professional schools.” 101
As Chapman correctly observed, “[t]he false aura of scientific objectivity surrounding
these new social categories aided the institutionalization of race and class biases;
furthermore, the psychological effects of negative student classification upon students
often created self-fulfilling prophecies of failure.” 102
Psychology historian Kurt Danziger’s 1990 work, Constructing the Subject:
Historical Origins of Psychological Research, marked a departure from the traditional
historiography of education and standardized testing because it provided a critical and
99
Ibid., 5.
100
Ibid., 36.
101
Ibid., 53-54.
102
Ibid., 57.
105
exacting interrogation of the “social construction of psychological knowledge” Itself. 103
Notably, Brown and others studied the metaphorical constructions employed by
psychologists to legitimize the profession. Danziger, in contrast, explored the ways in
which the “internal mechanisms of psychological knowledge production both constrained
and determined the types of truths psychologists could construct.” 104 As he pointed out,
psychologists sought to create technologies and methods that allowed for scientific
inquiry and subsequent validation.
Prevailing political, social, and economic values and norms necessarily informed
the interpretation of test results. The majority’s values and norms likewise inform the
methods used for acquiring that data. Danzinger’s work called for a “reorganization of
the limits of empirical and methodological rationalism for explaining psychological
inquiry – there are social as well as logical dimensions of psychological research
activities. The most obvious of social dimension of psychological testing is the need for
tested individuals to collaborate (or cooperate) with test administers; both a sense of need
and formal mechanisms for testing must exist or be created between social actors for the
enterprise to succeed.” 105
In Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, U.S.
science historian Theodore M. Porter analyzed how “rules and methods function to
replace selfhood or individual volition and lead to the objectification or dehumanization
103
Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 6.
104
Toron Monahan, The Rise of Standardized Educational Testing in the U.S.: A Bibliographic
Overview, (New York: Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, 1998): 3-4.
105
Monahan, “The Rise of Standardized Educational Testing in the U.S,” 7.
106
of the people described by numbers.” 106 To this end, the author cited the unique
character of standardized tests. Importantly, they evolved in military and industrial
settings with promises of scientific objectivity and were later transplanted to the public
schools. 107 As has been noted, educators used standardized tests primarily for the
purpose of sorting students into differentiated learning tracks. 108 Differentiated education
tracks were necessarily the end product of judgments on the part of administrators and
teachers predicting which students would be economically productive as adults and
therefore valuable and desirable as citizens, and which would not live up to the demands
of a rapidly advancing capitalist-oriented industrial state.
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, published in 1977, Michel
Foucault expanded on his earlier writings in which he analyzed the power of
technological systems to curtail the freedoms afforded by the notion of individual
“liberty” and autonomy and offered a critique of school districts and standardized tests.
Foucault pointed to the structural similarities that existed in broader technological
systems like schools, prisons, and hospitals, and noted the cumulative diluting effects of
these institutions on personal liberty and autonomy. 109
[The prison] had already been constituted outside the legal apparatus when,
throughout the social body, procedures were being elaborated for distributing
individuals, fixing them in space, classifying them, extracting from them the
106
Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 76-77.
107
Ibid., 209.
108
Porter, Trust in Numbers, 23; Danziger, Constructing the Subject, 14; Gould, The
Mismeasure of Man, 43.
109
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977), 3-5.
107
maximum in time and forces, training their bodies, coding their continuous
behavior, maintaining them in perfect visibility, forming around them an
apparatus of observation, registration and recording, constituting on them a body
of knowledge that is accumulated and centralized. 110
According to Foucault, people learned discipline and regulate their behavior in
accordance with the mandates of conformity dictated by technological systems. School
systems, with their ordered curricula, ongoing observation, and use of standardized tests
as means to secure accountability and differentiation contributed to this rarely
acknowledged “deprivation of autonomy and liberty through embodied regulation.” 111
For a sizeable number of contemporary observers, curriculum differentiation was
a convenient euphemism for "social control," that these critics suggested curtailed liberal
education to meet the labor demands of the country’s fledgling industrial order. 112
Founded in 1906 by a joint committee of educators and business and industrial leaders,
the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education (NSPIE) helped organize
vocational education programs in high schools across the country. Vocational education,
a form of tracking that critics easily, although inaccurately, linked to pure Deweyism was
expressly designed to train students for immediate employment following, or often
instead of graduation. 113
In contrast, reformers who focused on the administrative design in their efforts to
reorganize school districts, justified the development of vocational tracks by pointing to
the relatively small number of college-bound students and by holding it out it as an
110
Ibid., 231.
111
Foucault, The Birth of the Prison, 28; Monahan, “The Rise of Standardized Educational
Testing in the U.S.,” 17-18.
112
Monahan, “The Rise of Standardized Educational Testing in the U.S.,” 7.
113
Ibid., 18-24.
108
effective means of assimilating new immigrants into society. The course of these
students' secondary education path was predetermined, and on a practical level terminated
before it even commenced did not alarm these reformers. In the face of the rapid
political, social, and economic changes reformers believed were eroding traditional
institutions of church and family, the school was the last chance to immerse immigrants
in American values, while simultaneously providing industry with a consistent source of
trained workers. 114
The focus on the efficient management of school systems and students was
solidified by developments in educational psychology and intelligence testing. E. L.
Thorndike was undoubtedly the most influential twentieth-century educational
psychologist. Foreshadowing the rise of post–World War I mass intelligence testing by
relying on primitive versions in his own studies as early as 1903, Thorndike's research
advanced a narrowly focused stimulus-response definition of intelligence. 115 Reformers
used Thorndike’s work to justify the spread of worker training through vocational
education programs at the same time that his mechanistic conception of intelligence
tainted Dewey's own ideas about the innate connection between thought and action.
Relying on data gathered from his study of 8,564 high school students in the early 1920s,
Thorndike labeled his theory of intelligence as “psychological connectionism.” 116 He
analogized the mind to a "switchboard" where neural connections were created between
114
Ibid., 4-6.
115
Edward L. Thorndike, “The Psychology of the Half Educated Man,” Harpers CXL (1920):
666-670. Edward L. Thorndike, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Macmillan, 1940,”
Edward L. Thorndike, An Introduction to the Theory of Mental and Social Measurement (New York: The
Science Press, 1904).
116
Thorndike, “The Psychology of the Half Educated Man,” 666-667.
109
stimuli and responses. Thorndike believed the more intelligent students formed stronger
and better connections and at a more rapid pace than those of a lower intellectual
caliber. 117
For those reformers who emphasized the utility of administrative design and
practice in orchestrating the reorganization of the education system, Thorndike’s
conclusions provided strong evidence. By focusing on the decisive role of innate
intelligence through the statistical analysis of mass-administered intelligence tests,
Thorndike, H. H. Goodard, Lewis H. Terman, and Robert M. Yerkes provided school
officials and policymakers with scientifically-backed evidence that weighed heavily in
favor of increased psychometric testing and consequently student tracking and
differentiation. 118 In comparison to Dewey's more human and material-intensive
approach to education that emphasized individualized student attention and creative
pedagogy, Thorndike's conception provided the justification for separate curricula and
perpetuated and solidified patterns of unequal access. 119 Because of the inherent fluidity
and heterogeneous nature of education reform in the progressive era, it was possible for
both Dewey and those reformers who argued for a complete overhaul of the existing
system to advance their agendas in the name of democracy. 120 As education theorist
William H. Jeynes observed, changes in educational philosophy ultimately gave rise to
117
Ibid., 668.
118
Monahan, “The Rise of Standardized Educational Testing in the U.S.,” 18-26.
119
Ibid., 56-62.
120
Ibid., 18-26.
110
changes in practice. 121 The 1880s through the early decades of the nineteenth century
laid the foundation for a marked shift in public school policy in the U.S. During this
period, the liberal school of education theory and practice flourished under the direction
of Dewey and his followers.
Although the means adopted by various reform advocates varied widely, their
objective was remarkably similar: to restructure schools to mirror U.S. society as a whole
as it evolved in response to industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. As
Zilversmit explained, “[e]ach of these educational reform groups wanted to change
schools and adapt them to modern society. Moreover, each of them was part of the
progressive movement prominent in American politics and social reform in the years
before World War I. The focus of these reformers was on social rather than individual
needs.” 122
In line with the general call for change in education, state compulsory attendance
statutes became more specific and inclusive in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. These statutes required children to attend public schools, or an acceptable
alternative as identified by the law. They applied to children within a certain age range
for a specific period of time within the academic year. The general elements of
compulsory attendance statutes invariably included admission and exit ages, length of the
academic year, enrollment requirements, alternatives, waivers and exemptions,
enforcement, and truancy provisions. Courts have routinely upheld the constitutionality
of compulsory attendance statutes as valid exercises of the state’s police power embodied
121
William H. Jeynes, American Educational History: School, Society, and the Common Good
(Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2007), 211.
122
Zilversmit, Changing Schools, 2.
111
in Article X of the U.S. Constitution. In Meyer v. Nebraska, the Supreme Court noted in
dicta that the police power of the states is "founded on the right of the State to protect its
citizens, to provide for their welfare and progress and to insure the good of society.” 123
A state’s authority to mandate that parents within its jurisdiction send their
children to established schools was not always recognized. The traditional view held
that the duty to educate children rested with the parents. This concept originated with the
English poor laws that dated back to the sixteenth century. These laws mandated
vocational training for impoverished children. In response, schools were organized in
conjunction with poor-houses and workhouses to educate the residents’ children. 124
In the U.S., compulsory attendance laws date back to the colonial period. Early
laws focused on economically disadvantaged children and required training in skills and
specified trades through apprenticeships. Due to the immigration of their parents as
indentured servants, impoverished youth made up a sizeable portion of the population.
By the mid eighteenth century, the scope of the laws broadened to include training in
reading and writing. This, as historian David J. Hogan and others have argued, allowed
religious leaders to systematically indoctrinate the nation’s youth with religious teachings
conditioned upon an increasing literacy rate. 125 The Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted
the nation’s first compulsory attendance law in 1642. In holding with the traditional view
of parental authority, it required them to instruct their children in the basic principles of
religion, reading, writing, and a trade. Following closely behind the Bay Colony, other
123
Meyer v. Nebraska 262 U.S. 390 (1923).
124
David J. Hogan, Class and Reform: School and Society in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 57-60.
125
Ibid.
112
New England colonies adopted similar laws between 1642 and 1671. In contrast,
southern colonies did not enact laws mandating the instruction of children until 1705.
Early legislative pronouncements on education in the New England colonies spawned
from the perceived need for individuals to understand religious doctrines and moral codes
and to meet the growing demands placed upon colonial citizens. Although these laws
placed the responsibility for the education of the nation’s youth squarely with the parents,
they nonetheless laid the foundation for governmental involvement in education. 126
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, popular interest and support for
compulsory education declined in response to the convergence of several factors. These
considerations included de-urbanization into the frontier regions, the need for children to
work at home and on the family farms, the lack of enforcement measures, and a marked
decline in the value of religion. After the Revolutionary War, however, there was a
resurgence of interest in raising an educated citizenry based on democratic ideals,
religious diversity and tolerance, and the desire to seamlessly assimilate immigrants. 127
The Massachusetts School Attendance Act of 1852, a substantively and
procedurally weak law, required that children between the ages of eight and fourteen
attend school for twelve weeks per year, six of which had to be consecutive if the school
remained open for the entire period. If the child’s attendance was continuous for a sixweek period, the rest of the time could be made up at the convenience of the family by
attending school one day in one week and three days the next, for example. 128 Although
126
Ibid, 2-7.
127
Ibid., 57-60.
128
Harry Graham, A History of American Education (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 376-377.
113
the law did contain exceptions, they were vague, both on their face and as applied to
specific cases. If the parents were indigent, if the child was being otherwise educated, or
if the child suffered from ill-health, then they were exempt. The enforcement and penalty
provisions of the statute were similarly problematic in their vagueness and overbroad
reach. Compulsory attendance laws prescribed a minimum period that children had to
attend school before they would be lawfully employed. 129 It was generally around three
months, but enforcement was usually viewed as discretionary by local law enforcement
agencies. Because these statutes were vague and overbroad, and because of the economic
mandates of the period, parents who relied on child labor and blatantly ignored the laws
were usually ignored by local law enforcement agencies. 130
By the 1890s, judicial decisions at the state and federal level upheld the right of
states to pass and enforce compulsory attendance statutes. In passing on the
constitutionality of these laws, courts generally cited the long term benefit to the child
and the welfare and security of the state in general. In State v. Bailey, the Indiana high
court upheld the state’s compulsory attendance statute. In upholding the state’s right to
require a basic level of education, the court noted that "the welfare of the child and the
best interests of society require that the state shall exert its sovereign authority to secure
to the child the opportunity to acquire an education." 131 In its 1944 ruling in Prince v.
Massachusetts, the U.S. Supreme Court held that: "Acting to guard the general interest in
youth's well being, the state as parens patriae may restrict the parent's control by
129
Hogan, Class and Reform, 27-33.
130
Graham, A History of American Education, 376-377.
State v. Bailey 157 Ind. 324, 6 N.E. 730 (1901).
131
114
requiring school attendance, regulating or prohibiting the child's labor, and in many other
ways.”
Ohio passed its first compulsory attendance statute in 1877. 132 As was the case
with comparable statutes, Ohio’s law was met with firm opposition that stemmed from
"the unwillingness of the people to accept the principle that the state should be given the
right to interfere with the traditional authority of parents." 133 In its 1891 decision in State
ex. rel. Zugravu v. Obrien, the Ohio supreme court affirmed the constitutionality of the
statute. Notably, in Zugravu the court found the welfare of the child was so important
that the state had the right to interfere with the asserted liberty and autonomy of the
parents. 134 The court went on the explain that education benefits the state by producing
economically productive, and therefore valuable and desirable adult citizens. 135
In their groundbreaking 1980 study, Legal Foundations of Compulsory School
Attendance, Lawrence Kotin and William Aiken explored several factors in the labor
sector that reinforced the desire for compulsory attendance laws. 136 Included among
these was the desire to protect children from widespread abuse in the workplace. The
preference for skilled and literate workers increased as mass industrialization triumphed.
The introduction of children into the workforce resulted in competition among adults for
employment in unskilled jobs. This, Kotin and Aiken contended, was a third factor that
132
O.R.C. 3301.-34 (1877).
133
Graham, A History of American Education, 378.
134
ex. rel. Zugravu v. O’brien 150 Ohio St. 23, N.E. 664 (1891).
135
Hogan, Class and Reform, 19-22.
136
Lawrence Kotin and William Aiken, Legal Foundations of Compulsory School Attendance
(Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1980).
115
weighed in favor of compulsory attendance laws. The joining of labor leaders and
proponents of self-sufficiency and advancement among the human race created a demand
for school attendance. 137 The results from a National Bureau of Economic Research
study showed that school attendance in 1900 had increased markedly in those states that
combined compulsory school attendance laws with child labor laws. By the 1920s, the
majority of states had passed specific child labor statutes that set the minimum age for
employment at fourteen and included requirements of the completion of certain grades,
among other mandates. 138
The application of compulsory attendance statutes to students with disabilities
was largely neglected in the existing scholarship. However, in their 1993 article, “The
Institutional Genesis of Special Education: The American Case,” published in the
American Journal of Education, John G. Richardson and Tara L. Parker persuasively
argued that compulsory attendance statutes depended on the creation and perfection of
state-funded and legitimized means for dealing with students with disabilities:
The distinguishing mark of American education is that high levels of enrollment were
achieved well before states mandated compulsory attendance...the legislation of
compulsory attendance signif[ied] a mandate that states receive all eligible children of
school age. From this act forward, states increasingly met with the problems of pupils
unable to pass easily through the graded curriculum.... There is strong evidence that
compulsory universal education occurred only after these boundary dilemmas were
solved by the development of state-funded institutions for physically, mentally, and
socially exceptional children. 139
Richardson and Parker went on to note that:
1900.
137
Ibid., 74-82.
138
“Educating all the Children of all the People,” Office of Education Report, Bulletin no. 4,
139
John G. Richardson and Tara L. Parker, “The Institutional Genesis of Special Education: The
American Case,” American Journal of Education 101, no. 4 (1993); 362.
116
All states except two established the asylum before the reformatory, and all but four
states established the state hospital for the deaf prior to the reformatory. And, finally, all
but 11 states, nine of which were far western territories, established the state reformatory
before enacting compulsory attendance, In summary, passage of compulsory attendance
was enabled by the prior formation of institutions for the special and delinquent
population. 140
Judicially sanctioned alternatives to compulsory attendance in public schools
evolved over time. As Elwood G. Gee and David J. Sperry noted in their 1978 work,
Education Law and the Public Schools: A Compendium, compulsory attendance laws
must be “reasonable” as defined by the courts. 141 In Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the
Supreme Court provided a definition of the term “reasonable.” 142 The case centered on
Oregon’s compulsory attendance statute that mandated that children within a specified
age range attend public school, or their parents would be guilty of a misdemeanor. 143
The statute did not contain any exceptions or exemptions. In finding in favor of the
operators of a private school, the Court deemed the statute unconstitutional because it
violated the due process rights of the parents and the property rights of schools as
required by the fourteenth amendment. In finding for the School, the Court affirmed the
rights of states to pass compulsory attendance statutes, but invalidated those that tied
compliance solely to public school attendance. 144 Private schools were, in other words, a
permissible alternative. Whether the proffered rationale underlying compulsory
attendance statutes was economic self-sufficiency, educational reform, preparation for
140
Ibid.
141
Gordon Gee and David J. Sperry, Education Law and the Public Schools: A Compendium
(Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1978), 3.
142
Pierce v. Society of Sisters 268 U.S. 510, 513 (1925).
143
Ibid.
144
Ibid.
117
further work or study, character development, or the advancement and sophistication of
the general citizenry and the democratic process, these laws remained on the books.
The objective of an economically productive citizenry was furthered through the
outright exclusion of students with disabilities, and then through segregated classrooms in
common schools following states’ enactment of compulsory attendance statutes. Ohio
did not eliminate its exclusionary practices following the passage of its compulsory
attendance law in 1877. Rather it shifted the form of differentiation and classification to
segregated sight-saving classes. Segregated classes institutionalized the idea of the
“undesirable” student, and at the same time provided a vehicle to continue the tracking
system that predetermined which students were likely to mature into economic
contributors to the expanding industrial order, and therefore deserving of the full rights
and benefits of U.S. citizenship.
The segregationist prong of the eugenics agenda had a far broader reach than its
limited application to race relations, economic class, and the forced sterilization of the
feebleminded. It was particularly revealing in the development of the special education
system. Separation of students with disabilities was a eugenics-oriented design. It
implicated a classification and sorting system that utilized economic productivity as a
measuring rod of desirability. This scheme allowed for differentiation in the education
system between the deserving and the undeserving in the extension of the full rights and
benefits of U.S. citizenship.
Administrators and teachers aimed to preserve traditional notions of order and
efficiency in the common schools by utilizing back door arrangements to segregate
undesirable students. The establishment and evolution of segregated sight-saving classes
118
ensured that students who were believed to be incapable of being economically
productive, and therefore desirable citizens due to their status as visually impaired or
blind would remain on a separate track. By establishing special education classes, school
districts appeared to embrace the progressive measure of deinstitutionalization, and at the
same time ensured the continued viability of the status of undesirability, and allowed
teachers to promote the progressive ideals of order and efficiency. The marked shifts in
the general education theories and curricula during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries to demonstrate the necessity of a solid education to accommodate the nation’s
shift to a thriving industrial order in need of economically productive citizens, and the
centrality of the dual aims of order and efficiency that facilitated the establishment of
segregated classes in common schools.
119
Chapter 4
From Exclusion to Segregation: The Ohio State School for
the Blind and Sight-Saving Classes in Urban School Districts
Earlier analyses of eugenics artificially confine their focus to the movement’s application
to race, socio-economic status, and the forced sterilization of the so-called feebleminded.
However, the segregationist aspect of the eugenics design in the United States brought with it
damaging policies toward individuals with physical and mental disabilities. The impact of the
broad scale subscription to eugenic rhetoric and practice as applied to marginalized social groups
was evident in all facets of society. It was particularly revealing when one undertakes an
analysis of the movement’s application to the evolution of the special education system in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Separation of disabled students, whether in the form
of outright exclusion in the residential state schools, or segregation in isolated sight-saving
classrooms in the common schools was one of the strongest illustrations of the eugenics design.
It implicated a classification and sorting system that utilized economic productivity as an
assertedly objective measure of value and desirability. This allowed for differentiation between
the deserving and the undeserving in the extension of the full rights and benefits of U.S.
citizenship during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
The end of a desirable citizenry was achieved through the outright exclusion of students
with disabilities, and later through segregated classrooms in the common schools following
120
states’ enactment of compulsory attendance statutes. Like other states, Ohio did not eliminate its
exclusionary practices with its shift to segregated sight-saving classes. It shifted the form to
intra-district segregation. Special education institutionalized the idea of the “undesirable”
student. Segregated classrooms provided a vehicle to continue the tracking system that
predetermined which students were likely to mature into valuable contributors to the expanding
industrial state, and therefore desirable and deserving of the full rights and benefits of U.S.
citizenship. Through utilizing back-door arrangements to segregate undesirable students,
administrators and teachers aimed to preserve traditional notions of order and efficiency in the
common schools. The establishment and evolution of segregated sight-saving classes ensured
that students who were believed to be incapable of becoming objectively productive as measured
by tangible economic output, and therefore desirable adult citizens would remain on a separate
vocationally-oriented track. By establishing special education classes, school districts appeared
to embrace the progressive measure of deinstitutionalization, and at the same time ensured the
continued viability of the status of undesirability, and allowed teachers to promote the
progressive ideals of order and efficiency.
This chapter relies on data gathered from annual reports from the Ohio State School for
the Blind (OSSB) and on annual reports published by the Ohio Department of Education from
the 1870s through the 1930s. It opens with a brief history of visually impaired and blind
individuals in Ohio, including a discussion of relevant early legislation. Next, the OSSB’s
history is outlined, with particular attention devoted to its establishment, development, and
objectives. Finally, the chapter analyzes the evolution and ongoing role of segregated sightsaving classes as alternatives to the residential state school.
121
By illustrating the evolving and increasingly important relationship between law,
curriculum reform, special education, the status of disability, and back door arrangements urban
school authorities employed to deal with undesirable students who threatened the progressive
ideals of order and efficiency, the evidence demonstrates that the evolution of the special
education system ensured that students who were judged to be incapable of becoming
economically productive, and therefore valuable and desirable adult citizens because they were
visually impaired or blind would remain on a differentiated, vocationally-focused track. School
districts appeared to embrace the progressive measure of deinstitutionalization, but rigidly
segregated sight-saving classes ensured the continued viability of the status of undesirability, and
at the same time allowed teachers to promote progressive ideals of order and efficiency.
This paper relies on data gathered from annual school reports of the Ohio State School
for the Blind (School) and on annual reports published by the Ohio department of education from
the 1870s to the 1930s. It is organized chronologically within a topical framework. It opens
with a brief overview of the history of blind individuals in Ohio, including a discussion of
relevant early legislation. Next, the history of the OSSB is discussed, with particular attention
given to its development and purpose. Finally, the piece analyzes the development and role of
segregated sight-saving classes as alternatives to the residential school.
The first documented legislative nod toward the importance of education of students with
disabilities in Ohio was in 1811. David Phouts was awarded an annual stipend of $150 for the
“relief” of five students who were blind. 1 For unknown reasons this promised assistance was
withdrawn the following year. In 1818 the Jefferson County Commissioners were permitted to
1
Laws of Ohio Vol. 9, p. 68 (1811).
122
make an annual “allowance for the relief of John Twaddle.” 2 Twaddle had nine children, six of
whom were blind. 3 It took nearly twenty years for the legislature to enact broad legislation
pertaining to the education of students who were visually impaired or blind. 4
As was the case in other states, initially Ohio established separate residential schools for
the deaf, blind, and feebleminded. These schools were founded to educate, reform, and correct
the students’ disability so they could become self-sufficient, economically productive, and
therefore valuable adult citizens.” 5 The emphasis on decreasing the incidence of assumed
indigence among visually impaired and blind adults is undeniable. The enabling legislation and
individual school mission statements evidenced a clear desire to minimize disability and the role
of disability because it was assumed to be at odds with the ideals of tangible contributory value,
desirability, and ultimately U.S. citizenship. 6
In the summer of 1834, medical experts organized a convention for January 5 of the
following year in Columbus, Ohio. Among the topics discussed was the construction and
location of a Public Asylum for the Instruction of the Blind. 7 During its 1834-1835 term, the
Ohio legislature authorized Governor Robert Lucas to obtain data pertaining to “unfortunate”
individuals residing in the State. In an address to the Thirty-Fourth General Assembly, Lucas
noted that fifty-five counties reported a total of 202 blind or visually impaired individuals. At
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
4
Laws of Ohio Vol. 34, p. 648 (1836) (resolution to appoint three members to a board to collect
information pertaining to the instruction of blind students and the approximate cost of establishing a residential
school).
5
“The Ohio State School for the Blind,” Columbus: The School, 1954.
6
Laws of Ohio vol. 35, p. 116 (1837); Thomas H. Haines, A Mental Survey of the Ohio State School for the
Blind (Mansfield: Ohio State Reformatory, 1916), 4-6.
7
Ibid.
123
that time, the total number of visually impaired or blind persons residing in Ohio was estimated
to be approximately 250. 8
In 1836, Dr. William Awl along with several of his associates traveled to New York City
to view an exhibit presented by officials and students of the Institution for the Blind of New
York. Upon viewing the display, Awl turned to an associate and stated; “Ohio must have such
an institution.” 9 The associate, aware of the financial burden of establishing a residential school
and securing ongoing monetary support, attempted to dissuade Awl from pursuing the project.
Dr. Awl, however, believed the idea was both feasible and desirable and moved forward with the
plan. After returning to Columbus he drafted a resolution calling for the convention of a special
panel consisting of three trustees charged with collecting the data necessary to justify the
creation of such an establishment. Because the founders received no financial backing from the
state during the organization and planning stages, the cost fell to the individual board members.
To obtain the data, Dr. Awl, along with several of his associates, created, printed, and
distributed approximately 2,000 pamphlets to justices of the peace in every township in the
state. 10 The responses varied widely. For example, an officer in one unidentified locale
submitted a report on an 80 year old blind woman in which he made the following note; “she
8
Laws of Ohio Vol. 33, p. 453 (1835).
9
Federal Writers’ Project. “Lifting the Veil,” 5; “The First Century: Ohio State School for the Blind,
Columbus, 1837-1937,” (Columbus: The School, 1937), 2, Ohio State School for the Blind, Annual Report of the
Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the State of Ohio,” (Columbus: State School for the Blind, 1838);
“History of Special Education in Ohio, 1803-1985,” (Worthington, Ohio: State of Ohio Department of Education,
1987), 15-16; Ohio State School for the Blind. “The Ohio State School for the Blind,” (Columbus, OH: The
School, 1954), 5; “Ohio State School for the Blind: 5220 North High Street, Columbus, OH 43214, 3-4,”
(Columbus: Ohio State School for the Blind), 14-16.
10
Federal Writers’ Project. “Lifting the Veil,” 9-10; “The First Century: Ohio State School for the Blind,
Columbus, 1837-1937,” (Columbus: The School, 1937), 7, Ohio State School for the Blind, Annual Report of the
Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the State of Ohio,” (Columbus: State School for the Blind, 1838;
“History of Special Education in Ohio,”: “The Ohio State School for the Blind,” (Columbus, OH: The School,
1954), 8-9; “Ohio State School for the Blind: 5220 North High Street, Columbus, OH 43214, 11-14,” (Columbus:
Ohio State School for the Blind, 1954),14-16.
124
entirely refuses to come to your school.” 11 A justice in a different township filed a report on an
86 year old blind woman who stated emphatically that she was unable “to pay for an
education.” 12 As evidence of the prevailing attitude toward visually impaired and blind
individuals, another officer noted, “[w]e have plenty of seeing children down here to be taught, if
you have any money to throw away.” 13
Despite the negative responses in some locales, on March 11, 1836, the Ohio general
assembly took official notice of Dr. Awl’s call for an investigatory panel and passed a resolution
appointing Reverend Hoge, Cornel Noah H. Swayne, and Dr. Awl to a board of trustees and
charged it with collecting information relating to the education of the blind in Ohio. 14 The board
was further instructed to compile a report and submit it to the assembly at its next meeting. 15
The legislature directed the board to estimate the likely cost of establishing a public school for
visually impaired and blind children in the state. On May 4, 1836, the board presented its
findings to the assembly. 16
In December 1836, the board invited noted reformer Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe of
Boston, Massachusetts to give a lecture and an exhibition.17 This, the board reasoned, would
11
Ohio State School for the Blind, MSS 176, Box 1, Folder2, Ward M. Canaday Center Archives,
University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
Laws of Ohio Vol. 34, p. 648 (1836); Ohio State School for the Blind, MSS 176, Box 1, Folder1, Ward
M. Canaday Center Archives, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio.
15
Ibid.
16
Report of the Trustees Appointed to Collect Information Relating to the Education of the Blind.
Columbus, OH: James B. Gardiner, 1836; Ohio State School for the Blind, MSS 176, Box 1, Folder3, Ward M.
Canaday Center Archives, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio.
17
Samuel Gridley Howe, Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe (Boston: D. Estes and Company,
1906), 48-5
125
impress the assembly and secure its much needed financial support for the school. 18
As a result
of the board’s unceasing efforts, on April 3, 1837, the assembly passed an act allocating funds to
establish the Ohio Institution for the Education of the Blind (Institution). 19 The Institution would
be a residential school open to any visually impaired or blind child between the ages of three and
twenty-one who permanently resided in Ohio. The act, in addition to establishing the Institution
as a state-supported entity, authorized the trustees to purchase land, construct a building, and hire
one instructor. 20
The Institution was the first school for visually impaired and blind students west of the
Alleghenies, and the first state-supported school of its kind in the country. Although Boston,
New York, and Philadelphia already had schools for the blind, they were financed by private
donors and/or appropriations from the state. The Institution was, in contrast, strictly a statesupported entity from its inception. 21 When it first received state recognition and support in the
mid-1830s, it may properly be viewed as a progressive, forward-looking liberal design that
sought to improve the quality of life for individuals who were visually impaired or blind. It was
only within the context of a convergence of political, economic, and social factors and their
focus on order and efficiency that emerged over the next century that the Institution and later
segregated classes in the common schools became active vehicles of the segregationist prong of
the eugenics agenda in the U.S.
18
Ohio State School for the Blind, MSS 176, Box 1, Folder2, Ward M. Canaday Center Archives,
University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio.
19
Laws of Ohio Vol. 35, p. 116 (1837).
20
Ibid.
21
Emery M. Foster, et al., “State and Private Schools for the Blind,” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department
of the Interior, Office of Education, 1933); Elise H. Martens, “State Legislation for the Education of Exceptional
Children—Some Basic Principles.” Exceptional Children 12 (1946): 24-32.
126
On July 4, 1837, the Institution opened its doors with a formal prayer service at the
Presbyterian Church in downtown Columbus. Over 900 people attended. The Institution hired
A.W. Penniman, a graduate of a New England institution for the blind, as its first instructor. He
opened a temporary facility and held classes in rented rooms. Penniman, along with the
Institution’s first five students attended the July 4th ceremony. The number of students enrolled
at the Institution rose to nine in September 1837, and eleven in November of that year. In 1839,
the Institution used the funds appropriated by the trustees to construct its first building. It was in
full operation by the end of that year. 22
When the Institution opened its doors in 1837, students were admitted at the age of six. 23
In 1866, the age was raised to eight, but in 1873 it was lowered back to six. 24 Ohio did not enact
its compulsory attendance statute until 1877. 25 Under the statute, visually impaired and blind
students did not have the option to attend common schools. 26 Consequently, they either attended
22
Ohio State School for the Blind, MSS 176, Box 2, Folders #4-5, Ward M. Canaday Center Archives,
University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio.
23
Ohio State School for the Blind, Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of
the State of Ohio,” (Columbus: State School for the Blind, 1838), 14.
24
Ohio State School for the Blind, Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of
the State of Ohio.” Columbus: State School for the Blind, 1866, 7; Ohio State School for the Blind, Annual Report
of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the State of Ohio” Columbus: State School for the Blind,
1873, 4.
25
Ohio Revised Code S. 3321.01 (1877.
26
For example, Willard Abraham, “The Early Years: Prologue to Tomorrow,” Exceptional Children 42,
no. 6 (1976): 330; Edward E. Allen, Special Features in the Education of the Blind During the Biennium, 1918-1920
(Washington: G.P.O., 1921); Michael Anagnostopoulos, Education of the Blind: Historical Sketch of its Origin, Rise
and Progress (Boston: Rand, Avery, 1882), 24-26; Michael Anagnostopoulos, The Education of the Blind in the
United States of America: Its Principles, Development and Results (Boston: Geo H. Ellis, 1882), 4; Harry Best,
Ph.D., Blindness and the Blind in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 27-32; Linus B. Brockett, “The
Founders of Institutions for the Instruction of the Blind,” American Journal of Education 3 (1857): 477-481; Kate
Louise Cowdery, “The Legal Status of the Education of Blind and Deaf Children in the Forty-Eight States,”
Master’s Thesis, Ohio State University, 1927, 39; Jennifer L. Free, Equal Educational Opportunities and the
Visually Impaired Student Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, University of Toledo Law Review
37, no. 203 (2005): 207-208: Richard Slayton French., From Homer to Helen Keller: A Social and Educational
Study of the Blind (New York: American Foundation for the Blind, 1932), 4-6; “History of Special Education in
127
the residential school or they remained at home. In the beginning the subjects taught at the
Institution largely mirrored those taught in the common schools in urban areas. The instructors
made adaptations to the general curriculum to allow for Braille instruction and guide services. 27
Vocational training was introduced in the late 1830s to provide students the instruction needed to
become self-sufficient economic contributors as adults. However, in 1843, the Institution lost its
vocational program due to inadequate funds. It did not regain it until 1866. 28 From the
Institution’s perspective, its vocational training was a source of pride. Upon graduation,
however, students often had difficulty securing employment. Because they were trained in
stereotypical trades like broom making and basket weaving, students were not viewed as
valuable and desirable contributors because mass industrialism was applied as the measuring rod.
The legislature, noting the increasing rate of unemployment, and resulting poverty among
visually impaired and blind adults, established the Working Home for the Blind in 1866. It
blended the key features of sheltered workshops and group homes as they exist today. It was
effective in increasing the rate of employment among blind adults. For unknown reasons, the
Ohio, 1803-1985,” (Worthington, Ohio: State of Ohio Department of Education 1987):56-59; Henrietta Titus,
Education of the Blind: A Sketch of its History and Progress (Columbus, OH: 1867, 22-23).
27
Thomas W. Morgan, “Regimen and Curricula for the Schools of the Blind.” Thesis (M.A.) Ohio State
University, 1936, 211; Ohio State School for the Blind, MSS 176, Box 2p, Folder 1, Ward M. Canaday Center
Archives, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio; “The First Century: Ohio State School for the Blind, Columbus,
1837-1937,” (Columbus: The School, 1937), 15-18, Ohio State School for the Blind, Annual Report of the Board of
Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the State of Ohio,” (Columbus: State School for the Blind, 1840); “History
of Special Education in Ohio, 1803-1985,” (Worthington, Ohio: State of Ohio Department of Education, 1987), 3233; Ohio State School for the Blind. “The Ohio State School for the Blind,” (Columbus, OH: The School, 1954), 5;
“Ohio State School for the Blind: 5220 North High Street, Columbus, OH 43214,” (Columbus: Ohio State School
for the Blind, 1954), 51-54.
28
Ohio State School for the Blind, MSS 176, Box 2p, Folder 1, Ward M. Canaday Center
Archives, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio; Ohio State School for the Blind (Mansfield: Ohio State
Reformatory, 1920), 4-5; Ohio State School for the Blind; Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to
the Governor of the State of Ohio,” ( Columbus: State School for the Blind, 1843), Ohio State School for the Blind;
“The Ohio State School for the Blind,” (Columbus, OH: The School, 1954), 44-48; Neal F. Quimby, A Study of the
Curriculum for Residential Schools for the Blind (Collegeville, Pa.: The Independent Press, 1940), 76; Wilbur
Galveston Scarberry, “Vocational Training in Residential Schools for the Blind,” Thesis (M.A.) Ohio State
University, 1935, 66.
128
state ceased funding the Home in 1908. Also in 1908, it established the Ohio Commission for
the Blind to “improve the condition of the blind.” It was charged with coordinating services for
adults and assisting with education programs in the state. 29 Because the legislature established
the Working Home the same year that the vocational program was reestablished at the
Institution, it evidenced a concern with the economic livelihood of this marginalized group, but
the timing of the act also highlighted the preoccupation with the appearance of a homogenous
social and economic order in the U.S. This conclusion is further compelled by the passage of the
1908 act.
William Chapin, formerly of the New York School for the Blind, acted as the
Institution’s superintendent from 1839 to 1846. His administration was characterized by a steady
increase in enrollment, improved conditions, and general satisfaction among the students.
During Chapin’s tenure, the number of students increased from 36 to 68. 30 As a result of these
accomplishments, the Institution enjoyed a broader recognition both in the U.S. and abroad.
During its first decade, it made notable progress, and the trustees were satisfied that it was indeed
a desirable entity for Ohio to continue to support.
In 1847, just 10 years after the Institution first opened its doors, the total number of
students enrolled climbed to 150. 31 As of 1847, a total of 55 students had graduated. The
twenty-five female graduates acquired skills in various types of “fancy work, which together
29
I Ohio State School for the Blind, MSS 176, Box 2, Folder #5, Ward M. Canaday Center Archives,
University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio; Laws of Ohio Vol. 63, p. 170 (1866); Ohio State School for the Blind, MSS
176, Box 3, Folder #2, Ward M. Canaday Center Archives, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio. Laws of Ohio Vol.
99, p. 362 (1908).
30
Ohio State School for the Blind, MSS 176, Box 3, Folder 2, Ward M. Canaday Center Archives,
University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio; Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the
State of Ohio.” Columbus: State School for the Blind, 1839-1846.
31
Ohio State School for the Blind, MSS 176, Box 3, Folder #2, Ward M. Canaday Center Archives,
University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio.Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the
State of Ohio.” Columbus: State School for the Blind, 1847.
129
with the other domestic attainments, rendered them useful members of society,” 32 and therefore
worthy of being visible participants in the U.S.’s industry-driven economy. By the Institution’s
own admission, “useful” became a euphemism for productivity, and consequently for value and
desirability. Similarly, the 30 male graduates received vocational training that allowed many to
secure employment in stereotypical trades like basket weaving or broom making. Many
graduates took jobs assisting other blind individuals because they were easily accepted in that
capacity. For example, Samuel Bacon, an 1846 graduate, opened the Illinois Institution for the
Blind and went on to act as its superintendent for eight years.
At the end of the Institution’s first decade, Mr. Penniman was employed in a dual
capacity as teacher and interim superintendent. He, along with former superintendent Chapin
shared primary responsibility for developing the Institution’s organizational structure and
formulating internal policies. The Institution’s record was marked by substantial growth and
improvement in the quality of education for the blind. This, the Institution’s officials reasoned,
demonstrated that it was successful in alleviating the “suffering” common to blind individuals.33
Blindness was viewed as synonymous with suffering, and ideas of individual difference and
personal autonomy were wholly ignored.
During his twelve-year year service as superintendent that began in 1861, Dr. Asa Lord
authored a report in which he stated that it was necessary for the assembly to raise the wages of
the Institution’s teachers in order to retain them for a reasonable time. He pointed out that
teachers of the blind are required to have more advanced certification, and further noted that it
would be to the Institution’s advantage to employ a consistent staff. In addition, Lord noted the
32
Ibid.
33
Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the State of Ohio.” Columbus:
State School for the Blind, 1863, 1847, and 1852.
130
high probability that some Civil War veterans would lose at least some of their vision as a result
of exposure to various contaminants during combat. This had the potential to increase
enrollment at the Institution. By 1861, the Institution already had four cases. 34
In 1867, the board made up of Superintendent Lord, Henry C. Noble, F.C. Sessions, and
Stillman Wilt presented a joint recommendation to Governor Rutherford B. Hayes detailing the
necessity of the construction of a new building to better meet the Institution’s increasing size and
changing needs. On May 9, 1869, the legislature authorized the trustees to appropriate funds for
a new building at a cost not to exceed $275,000. Proponents of the legislation revered it as a
landmark in the Institution’s history. 35
On June 24, 1874, over 100 former students and officials gathered at a reunion to
celebrate the dedication and opening of the new building. Following a music and prayer service
in the old building, the attendees moved to the chapel in the new building where former
superintendent Lord made a presentation. The alumni, pledging to actively support the
Institution’s mission, began their first organization and adopted a constitution to govern its
affairs. During its early years, the Institution had a maximum capacity of 60 students. By 1874,
however, it outgrew the original building. It moved to its second building and increased its
34
Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the State of Ohio.” Columbus:
State School for the Blind, 1861; Ohio State School for the Blind, MSS 176, Box 3, Folder #4, Ward M. Canaday
Center Archives, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio; Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the
Governor of the State of Ohio.” Columbus: State School for the Blind, 1862.
35
Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the State of Ohio.” Columbus:
State School for the Blind, 1867; Laws of Ohio Vol. 66, p. 128 (1869). Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and
Officers to the Governor of the State of Ohio,” ( Columbus: State School for the Blind, 1870); Ohio State School for
the Blind, MSS 176, Box 4, Folder 2, Ward M. Canaday Center Archives, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio.
131
enrollment capacity to 300. Between 1839 and 1901, 2,058 students attended the school. Threehundred-thirty-nine students attended in 1901 alone. 36
The changes that took place during the Institution’s infancy were not all structural in
nature. In 1897, Superintendent Wallace began offering a course in typewriting—one assumed
to be of immeasurable value to visually impaired and blind individuals. In 1903, the trustees
appropriated $10,000 for the construction of two gymnasiums. 37 This evidenced a growing
recognition on the part of educators that physical activity was sorely lacking in the lives of
visually impaired and blind individuals. 38 It demonstrated a shift to a more holistic view of
education in line with the shifts in general education theories. In a similar vein, educators at the
36
Ohio State School for the Blind, MSS 176, Box 4, Folder 2, Ward M. Canaday Center Archives,
University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio; Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the
State of Ohio” Columbus: State School for the Blind, 1874; Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to
the Governor of the State of Ohio.” Columbus: State School for the Blind, 1875; Ohio State School for the Blind,
MSS 176, Box 4, Folder 2, Ward M. Canaday Center Archives, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio; Annual Report
of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the State of Ohio.” Columbus: State School for the Blind,
1875; Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the State of Ohio.” Columbus: State
School for the Blind, 1839-1902.
37
Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the State of Ohio.” Columbus:
State School for the Blind, 1898 and 1904.
38
For example, Abraham, “The Early Years: Prologue to Tomorrow,” 330-335; Allen, Special Features
in the Education of the Blind During the Biennium, 44; Anagnostopoulos, Education of the Blind: Historical Sketch
of its Origin, Rise and Progress, 14; Anagnostopoulos, The Education of the Blind in the United States of America:
Its Principles, Development and Results, 23; “Defective Children, Their Care, Occupations and Support.” Canadian
Journal of Medicine and Surgery 38 (1915): 4; “The First Century: Ohio State School for the Blind, Columbus,
1837-1937.” Columbus: The School, 1937, 38; Free, “Sheltered Workshops and Social Clubs,” 28; Samuel P.
Hayes, Self-Surveys in Schools for the Blind: A Manual for the Guidance of Teachers (Philadelphia, 1921), 12-17;
Samuel P. Hayes, Ten Years of Psychological Research in Schools for the Blind (Philadelphia, 1927), 3-5; “History
of Special Education in Ohio, 1803-1985,” 36-37; Thomas W. Morgan, “Regimen and Curricula for the Schools of
the Blind.,” Thesis (M.A.) Ohio State University, 1936, 54-68; Ohio State School for the Blind (Mansfield: Ohio
State Reformatory, 1920), 7; Ohio State School for the Blind. Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers
to the Governor of the State of Ohio.” Columbus: State School for the Blind, 1903--Ohio State School for the
Blind. “The Ohio State School for the Blind,” (Columbus, OH: The School, 1954);“Ohio State School for the
Blind: 5220 North High Street, Columbus, OH 43214.” Columbus: Ohio State School for the Blind: Ohio
Department of Education, 2002, 3-8; Perkins Institution for the Blind, Annual Report of the Trustees of the Perkins
Institution and the Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind to the Corporation, Cambridge: 1848-1940), 41-49; Wilbur
Galveston Scarberry, “Vocational Training in Residential Schools for the Blind,” Thesis (M.A.) Ohio State
University, 1935, 63-68; Schools and Classes for the Blind, (Washington: G. P. O., 1920), Titus, Education of the
Blind: A Sketch of its History and Progress, 33; W.B. Wait, Education of the Blind: Its Progress and Results (New
York: Bradstreet Press, 1892), 15; Winzer, The History of Special Education, 172; Arthur Wylie, “On the
Psychology and Pedagogy of the Blind,” Pedagogical Seminary 9, (1902): 127-137.
132
Institution sought to integrate modern methods into their classrooms. In doing so, they sought to
further narrow the divide between sighted students and visually impaired or blind students. 39
Despite these curricula changes that attempted to bring the Institution in step with the
progressive changes in the common schools, visually impaired and blind students continued to
attend the Institution and sighted students attended the common schools.
During this same period, the Institution’s officials expended considerable effort in
expanding its industrial arts department. The Institution also introduced instruction in home
economics for its female students. It offered instruction in other vocational subjects, causing the
Institution to boast of its up-and-coming methods to educate visually impaired and blind
students. 40 As was the case in the common schools, the introduction of watered-down, vocationoriented courses evidenced a desire on the part of administrators and teachers to institute a
tracking system through which certain students would be labeled as “college bound,” while for
others in the “vocational” group, high school was the end. 41 By developing and implementing
vocationally-oriented courses for all students at the Institution, there leaves little doubt as to the
prescribed path for these students.
In the early 1900s, the Institution changed its name to the Ohio State School for the Blind
(OSSB). The 1920s mark two notable achievements in the OSSB’s history. First, in 1922 it was
granted a first grade charter. Second, in 1927, as a result of the Gillen Bill, introduced into the
39
Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the State of Ohio.” Columbus:
State School for the Blind, 1904-1911; Ohio State School for the Blind, MSS 176, Box 4, Folder 2, Ward M.
Canaday Center Archives, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio.
40
Ibid.
41
Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the State of Ohio.” Columbus:
State School for the Blind, 1904-1911; Ohio State School for the Blind, MSS 176, Box 4, Folder 4, Ward M.
Canaday Center Archives, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio; Quimby, A Study of the Curriculum for Residential
Schools for the Blind, 111; Scarberry, “Vocational Training in Residential Schools for the Blind,” 157-159.
133
state legislature by circuit judge and a former student, the OSSB was transferred from the Ohio
Department of Public Welfare to the Ohio Department of Education. 42 By classifying it as part
of the Department of Education, the legislature evinced a clear intent to coordinate and
streamline the education of the blind with that of sighted students, if only in appearance.
In the early 1900s, educators began to note the benefits of segregated classes for blind
and visually impaired students in urban school districts. 43 In a chapter titled “Sight-Saving
Class Work from the Standpoint of the American Ophthalmological Society and the National
Society for the Prevention of Blindness,” published in Sight Saving Class Work, Dr. E.V.L.
Brown and Lewis H. Carris explained that the movement toward segregated sight-saving classes
was a form of special education that originated in London in 1908. 44 In the U.S., they were
originally termed “conservation-of-vision classes” and later “sight-saving classes.” 45 During a
visit to London 1909, Edward Allen, superintendent of the Perkins Institution for the Blind at
Watertown, Massachusetts was intrigued by the structure and function of the myope classes that
were established there by Dr. N. Bishop Harman. 46 By observing these classes, Allen devised a
method to address the problem of the visually impaired child in the residential state schools for
the blind. His objective was “to send into the public school system those children who, because
42
Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the State of Ohio.” Columbus:
State School for the Blind, 1905; Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the Governor of the State
of Ohio.” Columbus: State School for the Blind, 1923; Laws of Ohio Vol. 112, p. 358, Am. S.B. 101 (1927).
43
Matie Marguerite Carter, Sight-Saving Classes (Albany: The University of the State of New York Press,
1932), 27-34.
44
E.V.L. Brown and Lewis H. Carris, Sight Saving Class Work from the Standpoint of the American
Ophthalmolological Society and the National Society for the Prevention to Prevent Blindness 28 (1930): 155.
45
Brown, Sight Saving Class Work from the Standpoint of the American Ophthalmolological Society and
the National Society for the Prevention to Prevent Blindness, 156.
46
Allen, Special Features in the Education of the Blind During the Biennium, 1918-1920, 31-38.
134
of too much sight, ought not to attend schools for blind children and who, as a result, were
classified as blind educationally, socially, and industrially.” 47
As blind reformer and activist Robert B. Irwin observed in his 1920 work, Sight-Saving
Classes in the Public Schools, “[s]chool medical inspection has disclosed the existence in every
school population of a certain proportion of pupils who, though not blind, are seriously
handicapped in their school work by reason of marked defects of vision. These pupils can read
ordinary school books, but any continued use of such material is attended by so much strain of
the eyes and general nervous system as to jeopardize their sight and general health. The
operation of our compulsory education laws has brought these pupils forcibly to the attention of
school and health authorities.” The number of visually impaired students far exceeded the
number of those who were totally blind. As Irwin explained, “[w]hile the number of such pupils
is small, it is two or three times as large as the number of blind children. Furthermore, our
neglect of this class has made it a fruitful field from which to recruit the ranks of the blind in
later life.” Irwin, although a vocal advocate for equality for visually impaired and blind students
in his speeches and writings, nevertheless argued in favor of segregation. In discussing the need
for sight-saving classes as a necessary alternative for visually impaired students, Irwin noted that
in schools for the blind “they are no less misfits than they are in the regular classes in the public
schools. Schools for the blind accept them, not because it is felt that they belong in such
institutions, but because there seems to be no other place to send them.” 48
Irwin continued, “[t]he most common method of procedure in establishing a sight-saving
class is to designate a public school building as a conservation-of-vision school. To this building
47
Coffin, Sight Saving Classes, Cleveland Public Schools, 12-16.
48
Irwin, Sight-Saving Classes in the Public Schools, 11-12.
135
are assigned eight or ten children seriously handicapped in regular school work by reason of
defective vision. They possess sufficient sight, however, to make some use of ordinary book
print. The regular organization of the school is disturbed as little as possible, and not more than
twelve pupils are assigned to any one building.” 49 Because sight-saving students were
segregated in separate buildings and later in separate classrooms, the regular classroom teachers
were not forced to adopt alternative pedogological methods, and the ideals of classroom order
and efficiency were not threatened.
Sight-saving classes had three objectives; “first, to instruct the pupils with a minimum of
eye strain; second, to teach them how to conserve the vision they possess; and, third, to provide
such vocational guidance, and, if necessary vocational training as will enable them to fill the
most useful places in the community their powers will permit.” 50 Vocational training in sightsaving classes was seen as necessary to ensure economic productivity, and therefore desirability
as U.S. citizens. 51
In 1904, Georgia and Florence Trader started a class for blind students in the Cincinnati
Public Library. In response to an appeal by the sisters, Cincinnati opened the state’s first day
school in 1905 as an alternative to the OSSB. Irwin, one of the first advocates for the education
of students who were blind, was vital in the program’s development. Blinded at the age of five
and the holder of multiple university degrees, Irwin pushed for the extension of public school
classes to visually impaired and blind students. 52 In 1909, he proved instrumental in organizing
49
Ibid., 16 [emphasis added].
50
Ibid., 16.
51
Mitja Sardoc, ed. Citizenship, Inclusion and Democracy: A Symposium on Iris Marion Young Malden,
Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006, 1-5; Scarberry, “Vocational Training in Residential Schools for the Blind,” 15-18.
52
“History of Special Education in Ohio, 1803-1985,” 7-9.
136
the first day class for blind students in Cleveland. 53 The next year he helped develop a separate
class for students with trachoma in the same city. It operated until 1926 at which time its
remaining students were transferred to other Braille classes in the city. 54
After learning that schools in Great Britain distinguished between students who were
totally blind and those with some vision, Edward Allen of the Perkins Institute visited schools in
London and was encouraged and influenced by the programs’ designs. After meeting with
Allen, Irwin also became enthusiastic about the creation of separate classes for the blind and the
visually impaired. 55 In 1913, Irwin convinced the Cleveland Board of Education to designate a
class for partially sighted students. 56 In that same year, Allen developed a sight-saving class in
Boston. Cleveland and Boston hosted the first two sigh-saving classes in the country. 57
Between 1913 and 1919, seven additional classes opened in other cities in Ohio. 58 Irwin
oversaw these and other public school programs for blind and partially sighted students, and
pushed for state department involvement and oversight to ensure easy accessibility and
consistent quality for the students. 59 Also in 1913, House Bill 273 established public school
programs for blind students over the age of four and allotted $200 per child as the maximum
annual reimbursement to local districts. It also applied to students with low vision and made
53
Coffin, Sight Saving Classes, Cleveland Public Schools, 1.
54
History of Special Education in Ohio, 1803-1985,” 23-24.
55
Allen, Special Features in the Education of the Blind During the Biennium, 1918-1920, 2-3.
56
Coffin , Sight Saving Classes, Cleveland Public Schools, 1.
57
Allen, Special Features in the Education of the Blind During the Biennium, 1918-1920, 2-3; History of
Special Education in Ohio, 1803-1985,” 7; Irwin, Sight-Saving Classes in the Public Schools, 9.
58
Annual Report of the State Commissioner of Common Schools, to the Governor of the State of Ohio
(Columbus: Nevins & Myers, State Printers, 1913-1919).
59
Irwin, Sight-Saving Classes in the Public Schools, 27-31.
137
them eligible for special education services. 60 With its passage in 1920, House Bill 716
decreased the minimum age requirement from four to three for the entrance of blind students into
the public school systems. It also called for cooperation among school boards in conducting
classes for the blind. Finally, it required the state superintendent to prescribe and maintain
standards for school districts that offered classes for the blind. 61
In line with the progressive era’s focus on scientific objectivity and expertise, the
determination of which students belonged in sight-saving classrooms fell increasingly to
professionals. The determination was usually made by an ophthalmologist or teacher trained in
the instruction of visually impaired students. 62 The “guidelines” for admission into sight-saving
classes in the Cleveland school district read as follows:
The following standards of admission are given as
a guide in determining the eligibility of a candidate
for Cleveland sight saving classes:
1. Children who cannot read more than 6/24 at distance and
who cannot read 2.00 at 20 cm.
2. Myopes who have more than eight diopters of myopia.
3. Children who have progressive myopia.
4. Hyperopes who have symptoms of asthenopia and who have
more than five diopters of myopia.
5. Children who have an astigmatism of more than 3.5 diopters
and whose vision cannot be brought up to more than 6/24.
6. Children with maculae, nebulae, leucomae, which interfere
with sight and lead to eye-strain.
60
Ohio House Bill 273, p. 312 (1913).
61
Ohio House Bill 716, p. 104 (1920).
62
Coffin and Peck, Sight Saving Classes, Cleveland Public Schools, 3-4; Lawes, Methods of Teaching
Sight-Saving Classes, 11-13.
138
7. Cases of keratitis. In the interstitial type, if the vision
remains low after the eye has been quiet for three months,
or in persistent recurrent conditions while under treatment.
8. Children having congenital cataracts, or secondary cataracts
where no acute condition is present, with vision 6/15 or less.
9. Children having congenital malformations, where the vision
is 6/21 or less.
10. All cases having a chronic disease of the fundus, where the
vision is 6/12 or less.
These standards cannot be rigidly followed as each
child must be given individual consideration. 63
Conflicts between expert staff's procedures and teachers’ calls for classroom order and
efficiency were reigned in by affirming the primacy of back door rules and codes of conduct and
accommodating professional/expert staff in other ways. In Cleveland, for example, the centrality
of order was affirmed in a 1926 report titled, “Sight Saving Classes, Cleveland Public Schools.”
As the report stated, “interpretation of the diagnosis and placement of pupils, while science is the
guiding principle, still it is by no means closely adhered to as the condition of the child
frequently shows that he should be placed in a sight-saving class even though his classification
indicates otherwise." As further evidence, following its specific criteria for admission, the report
stated that “[t]hese standards cannot be rigidly followed as each child must be given individual
consideration.” "The condition of the child" 64 standard referenced in the report was a
euphemism for students who teachers believed would be too demanding of their time in the
normal classroom setting. Stated differently, "the condition of the child" standard was a back
door design used to promote institutional order and stability, not the result of objective, science63
Coffin and Peck, Sight Saving Classes, Cleveland Public Schools, 3-5.
64
Ibid., 3-6.
139
backed procedures. 65 As Joseph L. Tropea observed, "Scientific pedagogy" was encapsulated in
a bureaucratic order.” Consequently, expert staff could expand, legitimize, and tie the
segregation of students and curricula changes. He went on to note that, “[c]hild-centered or
progressive rationalizations not only transformed the terms and meaning of promotion but also
encouraged the exclusion of pupils from the regular classroom. In this case, a teaching tradition
was not challenged; rather, informal rules for order in the schools were affirmed-even given
license.” 66
Because segregated classes for the blind and partially sighted were so fundamental in the
quest to maintain order and efficiency in common schools, it was important to secure well
trained professionals to ensure student and parent satisfaction and, therefore retention in the
segregated environment. With the progressive era’s emphasis on expertise, rational design,
65
See, Anagnostopoulos, Through Education to Independence, 27; Raymond E. Callahan, Education and
the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces that have Shaped the Administration of the Public Schools
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 2-6; Coffin, Sight Saving Classes, Cleveland Public Schools, 6;
Joseph L. Tropea, “Bureaucratic Order and Special Children: Urban Schools, 1890s-1940s,” History of Education
Quarterly 27 (1987): 37-38; Jay G. Chambers and William T. Hartmam, eds. Special Education Policies: Their
History, Implementation, and Finance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 41-43; Robert L. Church,
“Educational Psychology and Social Reform in the Progressive Era,” History of Education Quarterly 11, no. 4
(1971): 390-405; F.R. Clow, “Sociology in Normal Schools: The Report of a Committee,” The American Journal of
Sociology 25, no. 5 (1920): 584-597; Deirdre Cobb-Roberts, Sherman Dorn, and Barbara J. Shircliffe, eds. Schools
as Imagined Communities: The Creation of Identity, Meaning and Conflict in U.S. History (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006), 52-54; D.L. Cohen and M. Lazeron, “Education and the Corporate Order.” Socialist Revolution
2 (1972): 47-56; David B. Corson, “Classification of Pupils’.” Educational Administration & Supervision:
Including Teacher Training Vol. VI, 1920; Marg Csapo, “Segregation, Integration and Beyond: A Sociological
Perspective of Special Education,” BC Journal of Special Education 8 (1984): 211-217; Ellwood P. Cubberley
Public School Administration: A Statement of the Fundamental Principles Underlying the Organization and
Administration of Public Education Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916, 3-7; Barry M. Franklin, “Progressivism and
Curriculum Differentiation: Special Classes in the Atlanta Public Schools, 1898-1923,” History of Education
Quarterly 29, no. 4 (1989): 571-574; Frank H. Hankins, “Individual Differences and Democratic Theory.” Political
Science Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1923): 394-401; Stephen J. Kunitz, “Professionalism and Social Control in the
Progressive Era: The Case of the Flexner Report,” Social Problems 22, no. 1 (1974): 18-19; Robert Kunzing, Public
School Education of Atypical Children (United States Department of Interior, Office of Education Bulletin no. 10
(Washington, D.C. 1931); Lewis A. Wilson, “Organization and Administration of Special Education in the Public
Schools,” Journal of Educational Sociology 6, no. 6 (1933): 371-377;
66
Tropea, “Bureaucratic Order and Special Children: Urban Schools,” 37-38.
140
order, and efficiency the formal education and training of sight-saving teachers was necessary to
cloak the segregationist design with an appearance of objectivity informed by expert knowledge,
rational thought, and science-backed legitimacy. Because of Irwin’s influence, Ohio had a voice
in calling for the training of special education teachers, and consequently the institutionalization
and legitimization of the segregationist prong of the eugenics design.
Irwin moved to New York to join the staff of the American Foundation for the Blind
(AFB). 67 One of his earliest contributions was to teach the summer program at Columbia
University to educate teachers in sight-saving instructional techniques. Columbia’s program was
the first time that an institution of higher education had awarded college credit for special
education instruction. 68 The first training of special education teachers in Ohio occurred during
the summer of 1925. Estella Lawes, coordinator of programs for blind and visually impaired
students in Cincinnati, and Winifred Hathaway, associate director for the National Society for
the Prevention of Blindness, offered a course at the University of Cincinnati in methods of
instruction for teachers in sight-saving classes. Olive Peck taught a comparable course at
Western Reserve University. In the fall of 1922, Western Reserve University and the Cleveland
School of Education jointly offered a course in eye hygiene. The students were made up of
teachers of sight-saving classes and school nurses. These courses proved vital in maintaining
quality programs to promote retention among sight-saving teachers, and therefore students in a
segregated environment. 69
67
Irwin, Sight-Saving Classes in the Public Schools, 31-36.
68
“Columbia Teaching Eye Conservation: Course of Training for Teachers to Protect Vision of Pupils is
Begun: Observation Class Opens,” New York Times 7 July 16, 1922, Sec. 2B, p. 2.
69
Lawes, Methods of Teaching Sight-Saving Classes, 1-6; Coffin, Sight Saving Classes, Cleveland Public
Schools, 7-8.
141
By 1927, Ohio had more students in segregated sight-saving classes in relation to its
entire school population than any other state in the nation. 70 Lawes had her geographic area
extended in 1931 to cover southern Ohio as well. 71 Consequently, there were four “leadership
persons” in the state to facilitate the development of sight-saving programs; Olive Peck (northern
Ohio), Helen Coffin (Cleveland), and Margaret Sharp (Division of Special Classes), being the
remaining three. Following Coffin’s death in 1935, Peck assumed the role of the blind and –
sight-saving coordinator for the Cleveland Public Schools. Her former position was assumed by
Marguerite Kastrup, an experienced sight-saving teacher from the Cleveland district. 72
In 1933, Ohio received national recognition for both the size and quality of its common
school blind and sight-saving classes. The trend away from residential schooling may be viewed
as progressive, but sight-saving classes were segregated and administrators and teachers’ central
desire for order and efficiency undermined it as a commendable endeavor. Irwin, now executive
director of the AFB, and Lewis Carris, managing director of the National Society for the
Prevention of Blindness, hailed the state’s programs in their paper titled “Fundamental Principles
Which Apply to the Administration of Schools and Classes for the Blind and for Children with
Partial Sight in the State of Ohio.” The paper was included as part of a bulletin published to
commemorate the first 20 years of sight-saving classes, rigidly segregated public school classes
for blind and visually impaired students, in the U.S. 73
70
Annual Report of the State Commissioner of Common Schools, to the Governor of the State of Ohio
(Columbus: Nevins & Myers, State Printers, 1928), 104; “History of Special Education in Ohio, 1803-1985,” 196.
71
Lawes, Methods of Teaching Sight-Saving Classes, 8.
72
“History of Special Education in Ohio, 1803-1985,” 23-24.
73
Irwin and Carris, “Fundamental Principles Which Apply to the Administration of Schools and Classes for
the Blind and for Children with Partial Sight in the State of Ohio.”
142
Following Ohio’s enactment of its compulsory attendance statute in 1877, the number of
students enrolled at the OSSB increased markedly. 74 Families of students with disabilities,
especially in rural areas often simply ignored the law. 75 Before the law’s enactment, visually
impaired and blind students attended the OSSB or they remained at home. 76 District
administrators and teachers had an inconspicuous place in the development of public sentiment
favorable to compulsory education. As Forest Chester Ensign noted in his 1921 book,
Compulsory School Attendance and Child Labor, school authorities were not "anxious to receive
in their well-ordered classes” students who because of a physical or mental disability would pose
a “threat” to classroom order and stability. 77 In his 1971 work, Ideology and Change in the
Public Schools: Latent Functions of Progressive Education, David W. Swift made a similar
observation in regard to compulsory attendance statues having the potential to force teachers to
deal with “undesirable” students. Administrators in urban school districts believed that the
exclusion, and later segregation, of “undesirable’ students was an effective organizational
practice. 78
74
Annual Report of the State Commissioner of Common Schools, to the Governor of the State of Ohio
(Columbus: Nevins & Myers, State Printers, 1888-1930).
75
Leonard Porter Ayres, Child Accounting in the Public Schools Cleveland Education Survey, Cleveland:
The Survey Committee of the Cleveland Foundation, 1915, 15-16; “Compulsory Education and its Relation to the
Defective Classes.” Association Review 5 (1903): 115-117; Leland Elias DePriest, “The History of CompulsoryAttendance in Ohio from 1900 to 1929,” Master’s Thesis, Ohio State University, 1933, 114-116.
76
Free, “Equal Educational Opportunities and the Visually Impaired Student Under the Individuals with
Disabilities Education Act,” 207-208.
77
Forest Chester Ensign, Compulsory School Attendance and Child Labor (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1921), 11.
78
David W. Swift, Ideology and Change in the Public Schools: Latent Functions of Progressive Education
(New York: Merrill, 1971), 74.
143
In 1889, an unnamed administrator in the Cincinnati School District stated that "the pupil
who failed to keep step with his fellows, or who, because of physical or moral defect seriously
interfered with the regular work of a class, tended to drop out, or to be forced out, of school and
the problem of the exceptional child disappeared with him." Order and efficiency in common
schools were dependent upon outright exclusion and later segregation. The organizational
effectiveness of the segregated sight-saving classrooms was suggested by the following; Ohio,
with a public school population (boys and girls ages 6-21) of 1,173,119 in 1896, had no special
education classes. 79 Students with physical and mental disabilities attended the respective
residential state schools or they remained at home. As Tropea succinctly observed,
“”[i]nstitutional learning produced exclusionary practices rather than an organizational model for
universal education, and turn-of-the-century legislation that more rigorously compelled
attendance would not erase decades of these practices.” 80
Ohio’s 1877 compulsory attendance statute challenged past exclusionary practices by
commanding compliance, and therefore the attendance of students who previously fell outside
the system. Traditional exclusionary practices were so vital to the order and function of the
common school that administrators and teachers were not willing to relinquish them.
Consequently, they adopted the back door vehicle of intra-district segregation. As has been
noted, enrollment at the OSSB increased following the enactment of Ohio’s compulsory
attendance law. 81 Because there were no special education classes operating in the urban school
79
Annual Report of the State Commissioner of Common Schools, to the Governor of the State of Ohio
(Columbus: Nevins & Myers, State Printers, 1889), 127.
80
Tropea, “Bureaucratic Order and Special Children,” 32.
81
Annual Report of the State Commissioner of Common Schools, to the Governor of the State of Ohio
(Columbus: Nevins & Myers, State Printers, 1878-1905).
144
districts at the time, blind and visually impaired students were forced to attend the OSSB to
comply with the law. At the turn of the century, advocates like Allen and Irwin argued that the
needs of the totally blind student were unique from those of the visually impaired student, and as
a result the latter should be educated in special, segregated classrooms in their home districts.
Administrators and classroom teachers, however, in the interest of the preservation of order and
efficiency, pushed for complete segregation in the form of sight-saving classes. 82
Administrators required an alternative to past exclusionary practices that would put them
in compliance with the law and at the same time defer to the teachers’ demands for classroom
order and efficiency. Special education classes, including sight-saving classes, provided that
alternative. They downplayed the resistance to compulsory attendance statutes by providing
intra-district alternatives to the former practice of total exclusion. Segregation of students with
disabilities in special education classes satisfied both the legal requirements and school
authorities' ideals of order and efficiency.
Segregated classes for blind and visually impaired students were established in many of
Ohio’s urban school districts in the first thirty years following the passage of the compulsory
attendance law. Specifically, Cincinnati implemented segregated classes for blind students in
1905. Cleveland established a similar class in 1909. With respect to the segregated sight-saving
classes for visually impaired students, Cleveland began its program in 1913, Cincinnati in
1914 83, Toledo in 1915, and Columbus in 1924.84 Because of the lapse in time between the
82
Allen, Special Features in the Education of the Blind During the Biennium, 1918-1920, 2-5; .Brown,
Sight Saving Class Work from the Standpoint of the American Ophthalmolological Society and the National Society
for the Prevention to Prevent Blindness 28 (1930): 155-159; Coffin and Peck, Sight Saving Classes, Cleveland
Public Schools, 2-4; Irwin, Sight-Saving Classes in the Public Schools, 9-11; Coffin, Sight Saving Classes,
Cleveland Public Schools, 41-47.
83
Ibid., 17-24.
145
effective date of Ohio’s compulsory attendance statute and the appearance of the first segregated
class, it cannot be claimed that a mass increase in enrollment necessitated special education
classrooms. Following the enactment of the 1877 statute, enrollment at the Institution increased
markedly. Segregated classes in the common schools in urban areas developed later as a
compromise between those reformers who argued in favor of full integration and administrators
and teachers who looked to preserve order and efficiency in their classrooms.
Special education classes allowed urban schools to preserve traditional ideals of order
and efficiency in the regular classroom, continue previous exclusionary practices, and comply
with the attendance statute. Ohio’s attendance statute did not eliminate the earlier practice of
outright exclusion. Rather, it shifted the form of exclusion to one of segregation. The
significance of these classrooms was not the number of students they enrolled each year. Rather,
their importance rested in the fact that they existed. Previous exclusionary practices could be
continued through administrative restructuring and benign, often benevolent rhetoric and
practices. The segregation of blind and visually impaired students in special education
classrooms in their home districts institutionalized and solidified exclusionary practices and
allowed for the preservation of order and efficiency in the face of changing external pressures
and constraints.
Reform, although heterogeneous in nature, with its emphasis on professional expertise,
order, and efficiency revamped the education system in the U.S. Segregation was accepted as an
alternative to pure exclusion and acted to further marginalize students with disabilities. Largescale general education reform masked the true nature of what occurred at the OSSB, and later in
84
Annual Report of the State Commissioner of Common Schools, to the Governor of the State of Ohio
(Columbus: Nevins & Myers, State Printers, (1910, 1915, 1916, and 1925).
146
sight-saving classes. An integral component of eugenic ideology was the separation of the
desirables from the undesirables, whether it was through discouraging procreation and
association, or by institutionalizing segregation as an alternative to exclusion to promote
continued adherence to the ideals of order and efficiency in common schools in the U.S. By
employing popular rhetoric that emphasized the value of inclusion and quality education for
blind and visually impaired students, and at the same time utilizing a back door alternative to
outright exclusion, administrators and teachers segregated disabled students in furtherance of the
ideals of order and efficiency. As Tropea explained, special education classrooms provided the
vehicle to achieve what “popular rhetoric claimed to prevent.” 85
85
Tropea, “Bureaucratic Order and Special Children,” 32.
147
Chapter 5
GAPE Periodization: Eugenics and Special Education
As disability historian Catherine J. Kudlick observed, disability is a crucial and
defining social category that commands an analysis similar to that of race or gender. This
conception expressly rejected the medical model which defined disability as an individual
pathology or affliction that necessitated a cure. This demonstrated the degree of
emphasis on external factors that mandated the appearance of a homogeneous political,
economic, and social order where the objective was to transform everyone into economic
contributors to a rapidly industrializing society, and therefore deserving of the tangible
and intangible rights and duties inextricably tied to citizenship.1
As Kudlick explained, the work previously done on gender, sexuality, and race
provide useful analytical tools in the way of a postmodern orientation and framework to
apply linguistic or textual analysis to evaluate disability. These methodological
frameworks may also prove useful in revisiting earlier scholarship informed by
traditional understandings of disability. Disability should lie at the center of historical
analysis-both as a subject warranting a separate, exacting review, and as a distinct
1
Catherine J. Kudlick, “Why We Need Another Other,” The American Historical Review 108, no.
3 (2003): 764-66.
148
analytical construct to inform scholars about the nature of power and hierarchy itself.
Understandings and articulations of disability were critical in identifying how and why
western societies constructed and maintained social hierarchies and stratifications. The
analysis of disability was decisive in determining how nations measured progress. As
Kudlick argued, hierarchy and power were based on the enduring threat of disability.
Metaphors that invoked disability were an integral part of the nation’s collective
vocabulary, thus suggesting the central relationship between disability and power
structures. Individuals and groups employed derogatory references to disability like
“manic Monday,” “crazy,” “retarded,” “stupid,” “lame,” “mad,” “monster,” and “blind,”
with alarming frequency. Persons with disabilities were seen as members of an inferior
social class. When these metaphors were employed by those in power they had a broad
impact in marginalizing those who the dominant class viewed as “undesirable.” 2 In their
use as a vehicle to dehumanize and further marginalize those persons the ruling class
deemed unproductive in terms of economic potential, and therefore undesirable these
metaphors became devices to secure power and control. Often times those who were
oppressed by the label of disability were not in fact disabled. However, the oppressed,
resented being stigmatized by reference to disability, and in turn lashed out against those
who were truly disabled. As Douglass Baynton argued in “Disability and the
Justification for Inequality in American History,” opponents of suffragists, abolitionists,
2
I Ibid., 785-789.
149
and immigrants used the status of disability to levy attacks against other “undesirable”
groups. As a result, those marginalized groups attacked disability in its true form. 3
Disability as a unique category of analysis was especially suited to a study of the
evolution of the special education system as representative of the segregationist prong of
the eugenics design during the progressive era in the U.S. Despite the wide variance in
periodization schemes, historians generally agree that the period witnessed mass change
in politics, social alignments, and economic centers. They disagree on what meaning to
ascribe to these changes. The medical model of disability prevailed among physicians
and other practitioners of the day. 4 The desire to conceptualize anyone who exhibited
any type of abnormality as disabled, in need of a cure was in line with several prevailing
interpretations of the progressive era. Reformers aligned themselves with a particular
movement because they saw some aspect of society that was flawed and in need of
correction or complete eradication. 5
For example, in his 2001 essay “A Pupil and a Patient,” Brad Byrom analyzed the
rehabilitation movement during the progressive era as it applied to patients with
orthopedic ailments. He argued that the beginning of the movement coincided with a
shift to the social model which allowed individuals with disabilities a greater degree of
personal agency and autonomy. 6 However, Byrom’s analysis fell short because the
3
Douglass C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification for 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), 42-47.
4
Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another Other,” 764.
5
Ibid., 790-793.
66
Brad Byrom, “A Pupil and a Patient: Hospital-Schools in Progressive America,” in The New
Disability History, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press,
2001), 133-156.
150
establishment of rehabilitation centers implicitly suggested the endurance of a strain of
the medical model. In other words, rehabilitation reflected the desire to cure a perceived
defect.
Studies of the freak shows were instructive on contemporary understandings of,
and the primacy of identity and representation during the progressive era. In 1979, Leslie
Fiedler published Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self. 7 The work provided a
history of social responses to physical difference. As influenced by the medial model
that prevailed in the 1870s, Fiedler revealed the most horrific aspects of the freak shows. 8
Through his work, the author addressed other insecurities in relation to identity,
perception, human nature, individuality, sexuality, and questions of life and death.
In Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit, Robert
Bogdan offered a revisionist treatment of the show and its participants. At its core, Freak
Show argued that the “freaks” saw themselves as independent and “proud” entertainers
who played a role on the stage. The freak show was a business, the freak was a player,
and the audience played into their hands by believing what they saw. Bogdan
demonstrated that the “freak” was a social construction predicated on prevailing views
about visibility, identity, and desirability during a period in which the U.S. was rapidly
transforming into a booming industrial order and self-sufficiency and economic
productivity became indicators of human value and desirability. 9
7
1977).
Leslie A. Fielder, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster,
8
Ibid., 2-6.
9
Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988); 113-124.
151
Eugenics reached its height during the progressive era. The movement
represented a desire on the part of physicians and experts to weed out individuals that
they perceived as defective and therefore at odds with the objective of valuable
participation in the U.S.’s
rapidly industrializing economy. Twentieth century studies of eugenics were largely
limited to race relations, socio-economic status, and the forced sterilization of the
feebleminded. 10 Susan Lederer’s 1995 study, Subjected to Human Experimentation in
America Before the Second World War, discussed the eugenics movement as part of its
broader focus. Lederer asserted that the experiments targeted the “weak,” including the
disabled, who fell prey to the authority of modern science and medicine. Her work was
notable in that it established connections between the women’s movement and other
10
For example, Garland E. Allen, “Eugenics and American Social History, 1880-1950,” Genome
31, no. 2 (1989): 885-889; Garland E. Allen, Eugenics Comes to America (New York: Times Books, 1995);
Garland E. Allen, The Ideology of Elimination: American and German Eugenics, 1900-1945 (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2002); Susan Bachrach, “Deadly Medicine,” The Public Historian 29, no. 3 (2007): 1932; John Beckwith, “Thinking of Biology: A Historical View of Social Responsibility in Genetics,”
BioScience 43, no. 5 (1993): 327-333; Edwin Black, The War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s
Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003); Chloe S. Burke and
Sarah Tembanis, “The Public and Private History of Eugenics: An Introduction,” The Public Historian 29,
no. 3 (2007): 5-17; Allison Carey, “Beyond the Medical Model: A Reconsideration of Feeblemindedness’,
Citizenship, and Eugenic Restrictions,” Disability and Society 18, no. 4 (2003): 411-430; Susan Currell
and Christina Codgell, eds. Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and the American Mass Culture in the
1930s (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); Frank Dikotter, “Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the
History of Eugenics,” The American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (1998): 467-478; Mark Haller,
Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984);
Daniel J. Kevles, “Eugenics and Human Rights,” British Medical Journal 319, no. 7207 (1999): 435-438;
Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Use of Human Heredity (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1985); Largent, Mark A., Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the
United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008);Paul A. Lombardo, “Taking Eugenics
Seriously: Three Generations of ??? are Enough,” Florida State University Law Review 30 (2003): 191281; Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Philip R. Reilly, “Involuntary Sterilization in the
United States: A Surgical Solution,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 62, no. 2 (1987): 153-170; Philip R.
Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1991); Stephen Steven, Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in
America (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999).
152
reform movements. 11 However she did not explicitly focus on the segregationist aspect
of the eugenics design, or apply it to broader classifications of disability.
Similarly, Paul A. Lombardo’s 2008 work, Three Generations, No Imbeciles:
Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell revealed that none of the Buck women
were in fact feebleminded. Lombardo provided convincing evidence that Carrie Buck’s
defense attorney purposely provided a poor defense because he believed Virginia needed
a sterilization law. As a result of the Supreme Court’s holding in Bell, thousands of
women adjudicated to be feebleminded were forcibly sterilized. In line with progressive
ideology and its deference to supposed scientific expertise, the Court placed the
determination of feeblemindedness squarely in the hands of physicians and other
professional experts. They were given a license to make such a finding if they believed a
woman, and consequently her future offspring would not be economically productive and
therefore of no value as U.S. citizens. 12 During this period, educators in the general
education and special education systems were given similar latitude to prospectively
determine which students possessed the desirable level of physical and mental fitness that
would permit them to mature into valuable economic contributors, and therefore be
entitled to the full rights and benefits of citizenship status.
There were individuals with disabilities who acted in ways that suggested they
understood the concepts of individuality, identity, and agency in constructing their lives
even though the medical model, if applied, would have rendered a different result. In “A
Philosophy of Handicap: The Origins of Randolph Bourne’s Radicalism,” Paul K.
11
Susan E. Lederer, Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America Before the
Second World War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); 63-69.
12
Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles, 2-3.
153
Longmore and Paul Steven offered a revisionist study of Randolph Bourne’s life. 13
Bourne was born with various facial abnormalities due to a doctor’s use of forceps.
When he was four, he was stricken with a form of tuberculosis that caused his spine to
curve in such a way that he never grew past five feet tall. Because of his disability, he
walked hunched over and, was labeled a “hunchback.”
Longmore and Steven’s study marked a substantial departure from the work of
other scholars in that it is the first to argue that his disability fueled his radical political
views. Other scholars analyzed Bourne’s life within the broader context of progressive
reform. Longmore and Steven, in contrast, evaluated Bourne’s published and
unpublished writings and made a convincing argument that he was driven to a radical
political ideology by his disability. As the authors explained, Bourne, because of his
physical appearance was unemployed for six years. The only money he had was what
little he made teaching piano lessons. Longmore and Steven make plain that Bourne was
mobilized toward radical political ideologies and action out of fear of a return to that
time. Although he was influenced by his experiences, Bourne did not speak openly on
the issue of disability. He did publish several essays on the topic, but this did not grab
the attention of his contemporaries. Special education was established during Bourne’s
life. Although, he never spoke directly on the issue of inclusion of disabled students, he
believed that schools should be inclusive and geared toward students’ individual needs. 14
13
Paul K. Longmore and Paul Steven, “’A Philosophy of Handicap’: The Origins of Randolph
Bourne’s Radicalism,” Radical History Review 94 (Winter 2006): 59-83; Paul K. Longmore, “The Life of
Randolph Bourne and the Need for a History of Disabled People,” Reviews in American History 13
(December 1985): 582.
14
Longmore and Steven, “’A Philosophy of Handicap’: The Origins of Randolph Bourne’s
Radicalism,” 67-71, 59-60; Longmore, “The Life of Randolph Bourne and the Need for a History of
Disabled People,” 582-583.
154
This view was at odds with that of administrators and teachers who embraced segregation
as a back door alternative to outright exclusion, and allowed them wide latitude in
structuring their classes to maintain order and efficiency. Exclusion and segregation
served to separate those students who by reason of their status as disabled were predicted
to be less economically productive, and therefore undesirable citizens as adults.
Bourne did not speak or lobby in favor of disability rights, but he did not attack it
as an identity category either. Helen Keller provided a useful point of comparison. As
Kim Nielsen argued in The Radical Lives of Helen Keller, Keller was determined to
prove that she was competent to secure the full rights and benefits of citizenship. She
wanted first to be accepted as a woman and only secondarily identified as blind. 15 As
Nielsen explained in her 2001 book chapter, “Helen Keller and the Politics of Civic
Fitness,” during the early 1920s, Keller became involved in socialist politics. She later
abandoned this position and joined the paternalistic American Federation for the Blind
(AFB). Notably, Keller was so focused on proving herself deserving of full recognition
as a U.S. citizen that she tried to distance herself from disability by supporting eugenics
practices like euthanasia movements and segregated sheltered workshop for the blind. 16
Disability as a distinct analytical category necessitates a broadening of the
traditional periodization schemes. The traditional frameworks were under-inclusive and
were often result-oriented on their application. Earlier frameworks for characterization
and classification of the period wholly ignore the role of marginalized political, social,
15 15
2004), 2-3.
Kim E. Nielsen, The Radical Lives of Helen Keller (New York: New York University Press,
16
Kim Nielsen, “Helen Keller and the Politics of Civic Fitness,” in The New Disability History,
ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 268-270, 279281..
155
and economic groups and individuals. These constructs approached history with the
white Anglo-Saxon male as their point of reference. They debated the role of, and
meaning that should be attributed to the rise of U.S. industries and to the industrialists
themselves. In its infancy, periodization of the Gilded Age and progressive era was
essentially a substantive debate. The discussion focused almost exclusively on the
emerging symbols of big business and their principal actors, rather than on where
scholars should place the opening and closing bookends on the period. In the midtwentieth century, the emergence of social history allowed for the inclusion of socially
marginalized groups. Historians focused first on race relations and then on the role of
gender. However, disability, as a distinct analytical construct remained absent from the
scholarly discourse.
It is difficult to classify and categorically reduce historical events, coexisting
political ideologies, social and cultural trends, and economic patterns to a uniform
definition that is sufficiently descriptive and inclusive without being overbroad.
Periodization devices are necessarily judgments about the primary actors, defining
events, and the relevant political, social, and economic trends. Periodization of the
Gilded Age and Progressive Era posed difficulties because of the definitions of the terms.
Gilded meant to gloss over a cheap piece of flawed metal with a thin layer of gold, thus
obscuring the true nature of the internal substance. 17 “Progressive,” on the other hand,
implied a forward looking orientation focused on advancement and modernity. Neither
term accurately described the period. For decades, historians offered prescriptions and
rationales for the appropriate dividing line.
17
Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 2.
156
In 1873, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published their famous satire of
political life in the late nineteenth century. In The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, it was
unclear whether the authors were referring to specific instances of materialism and excess
that they attributed to the era, or whether they were handing down an indictment of the
period as a whole. 18 At the time, when lay people spoke of the “Gilded Age” they did so
primarily in reference to the book or the play based on it. Unlike the case of
progressivism in the early twentieth century in which reformers frequently referred to
themselves as “progressive(s),” contemporaries did not describe themselves as “gilded”
or “the gilders.” In the 1910s and 1920s, cultural critics Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis
Mumford used the term to describe the “hollowness” and “barbarism” they believed
plagued the period between 1865 and 1900. By the 1930s, the origin of the term was
forgotten, but it had become commonplace among historians.
Over the next three decades, historians became less concerned with periodizing
the era and more focused on constructing a thesis against which subsequent developments
in the Progressive Era and New Deal could be measured. 19 Charles and Mary Beard
compared the rising industrialists to the barons in feudal times. 20 Similarly, Vernon L.
Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought portrayed industrialists as “predatory”
and wholly materialistic opportunists. For Parrington, large corporations threatened the
core tenets of democracy and its attendant egalitarian ideals. He referred to the period as
18
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warren, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (New York:
American Printing Company, 1873).
19
Rebecca Edwards, “Politics, Social Movements, and the Periodization of U.S. History,” Journal
of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (October 2009): 463-466.
20
Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New
York: Macmillan, 1913).
157
one large “barbeque” where ruthless, power-hungry business tycoons stooped to an all
time low in their quest for profit and individual gain. Parrington furthered lamented that
these capitalists had transformed modern America with its machine-oriented culture and
“mass-psychology” into a land where the “Lincoln and Jackson would be strangers.” For
Parrington, turn-of-the-century captains of industry wielded so much power that they
were able to redirect the country’s destiny away from the tradition of Jeffersonian
liberalism that he assumed to endure unchallenged.
Parrington described the progressive era as a “democratic renaissance.” It was, in
his estimation, a movement that prompted the people to rally against rule by the elite.
Parrington did not explain who “the people” were or examine potentially relevant
differences among unique classes of individuals. In his view, reformers were not
anticapitalists who wanted to abolish private property or implement a socialist order.
Rather, they were individuals who wanted to put the “American dream” within reach.
They opposed the enemies of that “dream”—greedy business tycoons, corrupt politicians,
and “special interests.” 21 The articulation of progressivism was undoubtedly narrow,
conservative, and restrictive.
It was within this broader context that Matthew Josephson published The Robber
Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901. 22 He launched a scathing
indictment against the elite industrialists and added to the Beard-Parrington critique of
21
Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American
Literature from the Beginning to 1920 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927), 2-4.
22
Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901 (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934).
158
U.S. business as an institutionalized design. 23 To this end, he described a small, but
influential group of men who quickly ascended to power at the time of the Civil War.
According to Josephson, political and economic restructuring occurred rapidly and
“relentlessly.” Large-scale centralized production modes displaced traditional scattered
decentralized, primarily rural economic enterprises. As a result of technology, industry
became more efficient. The social upheaval that followed was, in Josephson’s view, the
direct result of the industrialists’ push to organize and exploit the resources of the nation
on a large scale and to reorder the lives of farmers and workers to increase individual
financial gain. He conceptualized the issue as one of the people versus the “special
interests.” 24 Like Parrington, he did not differentiate among groups or classes of
individuals.
Following Beard, Parrington, and Josephson influential business historians rallied
in an effort to rehabilitate the public image of the U.S. industrialists. In the 1940s and
1950s, Allan Nevins wrote revisionist biographies of John D. Rockefeller in which he
argued that the bulk of the blame directed at this industrialist was unwarranted. Nevins
claimed that although Rockefeller did employ some unethical practices to build Standard
Oil Trust, he was more accurately viewed as an innovator, entrepreneur, and a systematic
planner. He explained that the Standard Oil Monopoly was a natural response to the
rising cutthroat competition definitive of U.S. industry at the time. In Nevins’ view,
Rockefeller’s actions were not unlike those of rising industrialists in comparable nations.
Consequently, Rockefeller should be remembered as one who imposed a rational design
23
Francis Couvares, Martha Saxton, and Gerald N. Grob, Interpretations of American History,
Volume II, From Reconstruction (Boston: St. Martin’s, 2009): 174.
24
Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901, 1-3, 2-5, 13-16.
159
on U.S. business and created a blueprint for philanthropy, not as a robber baron. 25 Like
the Beards, Parrington, and Josephson, Nevins and like-minded historians focused on the
industrialists themselves, but their assessments were opposite. Nevins’ work also
suggested a shift in the historiography toward the acceptance of modernization theory. 26
The emphasis on progress, improvement, and innovation necessarily allowed scholars to
focus directly on interpreting the issues of the day instead of being forced to construct a
thesis that progressivism could later be contrasted against.
The 1960s witnessed a departure from the individual biography approach as a
means to rehabilitate the image of early U.S. industrialists. In his 1977 Pulitzer-Prize
winning work, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business,
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. forcefully rejected both the robber baron characterization of the
industrialists and the idea of laissez-faire and a self-correcting market. For Chandler, the
late nineteenth century was neither a Gilded Age, nor the high point of what he described
as “finance capitalism.” Unlike earlier scholars who focused on industrialists either to
indict them as “robber barons,” or to defend them, Chandler focused on the middle
managers. He argued that the period witnessed a managerial revolution launched in
large part by this class. To this end, he analyzed the transformative nature of the largescale corporation between the Civil War and the Great Depression. As Chandler noted,
middle managers were not seen as the faces of industrial power, and as a result, they were
viewed as relatively benign in the early twentieth century. He emphasized the role of
25
Allan Nevins, John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise (New York: C.
Scribner’s Sons, 1940); 2-5, 7-13.
26
Richard Schneirov, “Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society,
and Politics, 1873-1898,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5, no. 3 (2006): 189-191.
160
management and higher executives in adopting new technologies to keep pace with the
demands of the period. 27
In the 1960s, historians became more critical of capitalism as an economic model.
They rejected scholarship that aimed to exonerate business leaders as well as that which
argued in favor of reform and regulation of existing structures. 28 In his 1963 work, The
Triumph of Conservatism, Gabriel Kolko argued that the most distinctive feature of the
modern state, “political capitalism,” dated only from the first two decades of the
twentieth century. In Kolko’s view, competition increased at the turn of the century even
in the face of the mass merger movement that was arguably launched to curb it. As a
result, business tycoons were ineffective in eliminating the unpredictable nature of
corporate competition, or in converting large firms into models of efficiency. In contrast
to Chandler, Kolko believed that corporations acted proactively and turned to government
regulation as a direct result of their inefficiency and inability to control expansions and
contractions in the economy. This lack of control meant tangible losses for corporations,
but as Kolko pointed out, it also sparked the rage of the masses who in turn used the
power of the ballot to impose political controls on business. Progressivism was the
meeting of government and business. The masses were viewed as just that; masses.
Kolko, like his predecessors, did not distinguish among social, political, economic, or
other societal divisions.
Perhaps most radical was Kolko’s argument that the reformers who believed that
regulation meant democratic control over the “robber barons” had in fact been fooled.
27
Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977); 2-3, 17-21.
28
Couvares, Saxton, and Grob, Interpretations of American History, 176.
161
Progressivism was, at its core, a tool for the corporate elite. As he explained, those who
endeavored to author the regulatory legislation and staff the regulatory agencies hoped to
rationalize the economy by solidifying the rule of corporate capitalists. According to
Kolko, progressivism arose out of the assumption that corporate health was synonymous
with the health of the nation. 29 His work added yet another dimension to evaluate the
role of the industrialists. Although he did not return to the robber baron analysis in its
pure form, he did portray the industrialists as having the upper hand and using it to allow
lay reformers, conceptualized as a homogeneous mass, to believe they were changing
political, social, and economic norms. 30 In line with Kolko’s thesis, in The Corporate
Ideal in the Liberal State, James Weinstein argued that the ideal of a liberal social order
at the center of progressivism was created by the more “sophisticated” leaders of the
nation’s largest corporations and financial centers to curb more radical pushes for
reform. 31
At the same time, historians began to analyze the connections between technology
and economic progress. They explored the social, political, and economic changes
brought about by the introduction of new technologies. By necessity, they were forced to
address the role of the poor working class, if only implicitly. In his 1977 work, America
by Design, David F. Noble argued that machines were never by themselves “decisive
forces of production.” Their basic implementation and function was the product of
decisions on the part of managers who desired unchallenged power. Noble pointed out
29
Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 19001916 (Glencore, Ill.: The Free Press, 1963); 2-9.
30
Couvares, Saxton, and Grob, Interpretations of American History, 177.
31
James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1968).
162
that workers were often guided by institutionalized “fantasies” of advancement and
progress that let them believe that they were instrumental in the push toward modernity.
When engineers declined to develop professional independence, they stopped being
agents of progress and efficiency and instead became the unwitting servants of
capitalists’ “lust for power and control.” 32
James Livingston also argued that neither structural nor technological forces were
determinative in pure economic development. For Livingston, the ascendency and
ultimate victory of corporate capitalism was neither linear nor inevitable. As he
explained, during times when prices dropped and managers scrambled to restore profits
through wage cuts or by cutting work hours, workers organized. As Livingston
observed, workers were empowered and rational and they organized to carry out
collective action that often won concessions from large corporations. He explained that
businessmen employed various tactics at different times, or simultaneously to meet
changing needs. With this came the emergence of a new class of professional managers.
In the end, corporate capitalism represented a wide array of solutions to economic issues
and “social stalemate.” 33
Beginning in the 1950s most historians applied some version of modernization
theory to the Gilded Age. As a result, they usually treated the progressive era as an
extension of a push toward modernity. However, in 1955 with his Pulitzer-Prize winning
work, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R., U.S. historian Richard Hofstadter
32
David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism
(New York: Knopf, 1977), 2-3, 58-64.
33
James Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate
Capitalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986); 62.
163
forever changed the historiography of the period. Later scholars would question the
scope or substantive reach of his analysis, but his work fundamentally altered the
framework for analysis of the period. In The Age of Reform, Hofstadter, in an effort to
divorce the New Deal from earlier reform impulses (as well as from socialism and
communism) conceptualizes progressivism as the response of “status-anxious middle
class urbanites” to the changes they encountered as the country industrialized. In his
view, the descendants of Anglo-Saxon Protestant families found themselves displaced
from their traditional spheres of power by a new rising plutocracy on the one hand, and
by immigrant-backed big city bosses on the other. As a result, this predominately
Yankee middle class felt threatened and pursued reforms in an effort to rebuild their
political and social standing. They launched a moral crusade predicated on the idea that
only men of character, “the right sort of people” should rule. 34
Hofstadter’s work was significant because it, along with George Mowry’s work,
represented the first attempts to apply a group-based analysis to the progressive era
within the broader context of modernization theory. Earlier scholars defined the resisters
as “the people.” By establishing a classification scheme to determine which people were
relevant, and by constructing an analytical framework to evaluate their role in the broader
movement, Hofstadter redefined the contours of the fundamental debates surrounding
progressivism. 35 He drew a distinct line between the Populists, who he conceptualized
as rural people who looked to generations passed “where there were few millionaires and
34
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Knopf, 1955); 18.
35
Steven A. Diner, “Linking Politics and People: The Historiography of the Progressive Era,”
OAH Magazine of History 13, no. 3 (1999): 5-6.
164
no one lived in poverty and the farmers’ harvests were plentiful,” one the one hand, and
progressives on the other. 36
Some historians writing after Hofstadter challenged his emphasis on class and/or
argued that he defined the relevant group incorrectly. Others developed a new synthesis
based on “organizational theory,” an offshoot of modernization theory. 37 The latter
viewed U.S. society as increasingly dominated by hierarchical and bureaucratic structures
and characterized by a heightened level of professionalization. Nineteenth-century
values of rugged individualism yielded to concerns of order, efficiency, collaboration,
and systematic government. 38 This in turn, reinforced the idea that progressives intended
to run the state in accordance with the ideals of efficiency and professional, scientific
management. For these scholars, reform meant nothing more than adaptation to
modernization. 39
In his 1957 work, The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914, Samuel Hays found
the origins of progressivism in the upper-class elite. Progressive politics was launched
with the marked growth in large-scale corporations dependent on administrative
processes such as massive data input, absentee records, and payroll records. Hays argued
that these processes facilitated the growth of cosmopolitan forces as opposed to strictly
36
Couvares, Saxton, and Grob, Interpretations of American History, 176; Hofstadter, The Age of
Reform: From Bryan to FDR, 174-186.
37
Diner, “Linking Politics and People,” 7.
38
Covares, Saxton, and Grob, Interpretations of American History, 178; Diner, “Linking Politics
and People: The Historiography of the Progressive Era,” 7-9.
39
Diner, “Linking Politics and People,” 7-9.
165
local ones. 40 This, Hays reasoned, created a dynamic of progressive politics. He defined
progressive politics as the upward flow of decision making—from bosses to city
managers, from towns to counties, from schools to school boards and superintendents. 41
This hierarchy order of decision making was intentional in its design and was directed
toward maintaining ideals of order and institutional efficiency. 42
In this same vein, Robert Wiebe’s seminal work, The Search for Order, 18771920 linked progressivism to a new middle class. 43 Dating the movement’s rise to
around 1900, Wiebe argued that progressives were a group of professional bureaucrats
who were instrumental in engineering the transformation of the country from a nation of
“island communities” to a highly centralized, hierarchical bureaucratic order.
Relationships were more personal, communication was usually face-to-face, and one did
not have to venture beyond the confines of their community to acquire the knowledge
needed for success. 44 By the 1880s, advances in technology and broader economic
changes combined to undermine the cooperative and cohesive nature of these
communities leaving people vulnerable and ultimately displaced. As a result, they
“search[ed] for order.” As Wiebe claimed, reformers went about their search in a variety
of ways. Traditionalists attempted to restore local communities and their attendant
40
Samuel P. Hayes, The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995); 22-29.
41
Couvares, Saxton, and Grob, Interpretations of American History, 179; Hayes, The Response to
Industrialism, 1885-1914; 3-517-24.
42
Hayes, The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914, 74-79.
43
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966).
44
Couvares, Saxton, and Grob, Interpretations of American History, 179;Wiebe, The Search for
Order, 1877-1920, 2-4, 179.
166
values. Others pushed for agrarian or monetary reform. Still others looked for order in
moral reform.
For these reformers, progressivism was the end product of the synthesis of
efficiency and systemization. It was, in Wiebe’s view, a movement of organizationminded men wrapped up in visions of social efficiency and progress, order,
systemization, and science-backed management techniques. Throughout the work,
Wiebe drew attention to the role of a new brand of middle class professionals and
managers in creating a rationalist, bureaucratic society. He analyzed the reform efforts as
a series of movements directed toward constructing the social and political pillars of U.S.
society. 45 In contrast to Hofstadter who viewed progressivism as the agitation of the
unorganized against the impacts of broad-scale organization, Wiebe found the dynamic to
be the exact opposite. Also unlike Hofstadter, Wiebe defined the group at issue more
narrowly. Hofstadter pointed to a status-anxious, Protestant, Yankee middle class. 46
Wiebe, in contrast, looked to the descendants of Hofstadter’s middle class and
acknowledges that most of them were formally educated and had the benefits of their
expertise. 47
In contrast to earlier writings, another influential group of scholars argued that
progressivism was a wide-sweeping critique levied at social inequality and injustice. In
Urban Liberalism and Progressivism, Joseph Huthmacher first rejected Hofstadter’s
contention that progressivism was a middle class movement spawned by status-anxiety.
45
Wiebe, Robert, The Search for Order, 13-18, 2-4.
46
Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR, 18.
47
Wiebe, Robert, The Search for Order, 68-76.
167
For Huthmacher, the proper subject for analysis was the political activity of some of the
blue collar immigrants and their leaders. He found that urban immigrants supported
many social and political reforms seen as progressive. Progressivism in the city,
according to Huthmacher, was more broadly based and relied on the active participation
of workers and other lower-class groups. 48 Huthmacher’s findings called into question
Hofstadter’s conception of the progressives as old stock Protestant, status-anxious,
middle class individuals. 49 Notably, his work updated the earlier view that the
Progressive movement was simply a struggle between liberals and conservatives. 50
In a similar vein, John Burnham objected to the organizational view’s portrayal of
progressives as cold experts as opposed to passionate, committed individuals who
volunteered to force societal change. Burnham showed that progressives combined
Protestant moral values with scientific knowledge to produce measurable outcomes. He
claimed that moral conviction rested at the core of these movements and was crucial to
specific progressive achievements like child labor laws and public health initiatives. 51
Following Huthmacher, many historians attempted to construct the idea of
progressivism as coalition politics in other contexts. Reform movements were alliances,
not just of social and structural reformers, but of diverse groups and interests that
reflected broad political, economic, and social interest groups. Progressive politics was
48
Joseph J. Huthmacher, “Urban Liberalism in the Age of Reform,” Mississippi Valley Historical
Review 44 (1962): 231-241.
49
Couvares, Saxton, and Grob, Interpretations of American History, 176.
50
Diner, “Linking Politics and People,” 8.
51 51
John D. Buenker, John C. Burnham, and Robert M. Crunden, Progressivism (Cambridge,
Mass.: 1977).
168
real politics. It was not simply a public display to convince the masses of their electoral
presence while the real politics of the day were conducted by middle-class technocrats. 52
This view suggested that progressive politics, although real, was small and local in
nature. This realization led some historians to abandon their quest to define, much less
attempt to periodize the era. 53
Peter Filene’s 1970 essay “An Obituary for the Progressive Era” expressed the
misgivings and ambivalence that many historians shared. Filene began by carefully
defining the term “movement.” He concluded that early twentieth-century reform
impulses never exhibited the cohesiveness necessary to qualify as a distinct political or
social movement. He found a pluralistic presentation of political views in the era.
According to Filene, the core issue was not reform in the usual sense. Rather, it was the
multitude of “aggressive” and “explosive” political savvy interest groups that emerged to
fill the void left by the erosion of traditional party loyalties. The era was marked by
ideologically fluid, issue-centered groups-all of which laid claim to the restructuring of
U.S. society. In the end, Filene determines that the progressive movement was nothing
more than a manufactured analytical framework on the part of overzealous academics.
Consequently, he urged historians to drop the “progressive language” and divert their
energies to more fruitful tasks. 54
Other scholars approached the complexity of the subject in new ways as opposed
to abandoning the dialogue completely. Daniel Rodgers’ 1982 article “In Search of
52
Couvares, Saxton, and Grob, Interpretations of American History, 180.
53
Diner, “Linking Politics and People,” 7-8.
54
Peter Filene, “An Obituary for the Progressive Movement,” 20-22, 20-27.
169
Progressivism” explained that historians no longer attempt to describe the era within a
single social or political framework. Rodgers argued that the concurrence of three
languages made the period distinct. The languages of antimonopolism, social bonds, and
efficiency afforded contemporaries the flexibility tneeded to deal with a variety of
political, social, and economic changes. 55 In contrast to Filene, Rodgers viewed
progressivism as a distinct, yet broad and diverse ideology. In The Progressive Era: A
Search for a Synthesis John D. Buenker argued that progressivism was a system of
shifting, fluid coalitions that permitted once distinct groups to form alliances around
specific issues for well-defined purposes. 56 Similarly, in Social Tensions and the Origins
of Progressivism David Thelen argued that progressivism was a direct result of the
experience of the economic panic and subsequent depression of the 1890s as opposed to
the protracted contest between specific social groups. In Thelen’s view, progressivism
was more appropriately viewed as a revolt against corporate arrogance that mobilized
middle class, working class, and at times the upper class, to unite to agitate in favor of or
against specific behavior. This work was significant in that it challenges the oncedominant view that progressivism was an arm of the elite. More importantly, Thelen
exposed the flaws inherent in attempting to reduce such a complex, diverse movement to
classifications such as “middle class” or “cosmopolitan.” 57
55
Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4
(1982): 113-132, 117-118.
56
175-193.
John D. Buenker, “The Progressive Era: A Search for a Synthesis,” Mid-America 51 (1969):
57
David P. Thelen, “Social Tensions and the Origins of Progressivism,.” Journal of American
History 56 (1969): 323-341.
170
Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, historians looked to other disciplines, both for
their substantive arguments, and to improve their methodologies. The rise of the new
social histories afforded historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era the opportunity
to reevaluate earlier characterizations. Women’s history was instructive in this area.
Kathryn Kish Sklar argued that women used the language of “materialism” to infuse
progressivism with a passion to put constraints on the powerful and to promote justice
and equality. As she claimed, because labor relations were precarious and socialism as a
political alternative was deemed “radical” and anti-American, middle class women took
on the role of applying moral judgments to market relations, for introducing both
Christian “clarity” and modern hygiene to address the problems of the “social
household.” Because they could not vote, women used their influence in other ways. As
Sklar observed, women acted as teachers, nurturers, and “scolds” toward men who had
been morally derailed by the competitive nature of big business. They fought to expand
the franchise because they needed to “tame the increasingly fierce society.” However, as
the author explained, women were active in issues beyond suffrage. For example, they
were especially present in moral and civil service reforms. 58
In her 2002 article “Men are From the Gilded Age, Women are From the
Progressive Era,” Elisabeth Perry argued that the inclusion of women as central players in
progressive era politics necessitated a broader periodization. Earlier approaches to the
progressive era were written from the male point of view, focused on “male issues,” or
simply declined to include women because it was assumed that they were not political
58
Kathryn Kish Sklar, “The Historical Foundations of Women’s Power in the Creation of the
American Welfare State, 1880-1920” in Mothers of a New World: Maternalistic Politics and the Origins of
Welfare States, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (New York: Routledge, 1993), 43-92.
171
before 1920 when suffrage was extended. Perry offered a host of evidence suggesting
women’s political involvement as early as the 1870s in some locales and movements.
Earlier narratives of the progressive era begin at around 1900, or in some cases at 1890.
However, as Perry argued, viewing women as central to the reconstruction of social and
political forces in the state during the progressive era required historians to rethink where
they placed the opening and closing bookends. Perry noted that the inclusion of women
in progressive era studies has improved over the past 15 years, but the treatment of
women as central political figures in progressive reform circles remains incomplete. To
allow for the consideration of women as central political participants in the progressive
era, Perry proposed that scholars view the era as beginning in 1870, and ending around
1950. 59
Robyn Muncy proposed 1935 as an alternative end date because that was when
the Roosevelt administration authorized the Social Security Act. On its face, the act was
a positive measure because it introduced old-age pensions among other benefits.
However, because of its exemptions, women often did not qualify for payments. For
example, benefits did not extend to domestic servants, and the majority of them were
women. Muncy called the act both a “triumph and an end to female domination” in the
nation. 60
Recent studies of progressivism attempted to fill a void in or completely revise
the existing narrative. Michael McGerr’s 2003 work A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and
59
Elisabeth Perry, “Men are from the Gilded Age, Women are from the Progressive Era,” Journal
of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1, no. 1 (2002):25-26, 37-38.
60
Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 1-7.
172
Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 envisioned a broader
periodization scheme to include the variety of interests. At its core, A Fierce Discontent
argued that progressivism was a movement for control of big business, assistance to those
living in poverty, and a general cleaning up of politics. 61 McGerr succeeded in
synthesizing the once-competing analyses of progressivism. His work had far reaches in
displaying the richness and complexity of the movement as evidenced by the diversity of
the interests involved.
In recent years, historians offered revisions to previous work on the Gilded Age as
well. In 2006, Richard Schneirov published an essay titled “Thoughts on Periodizing the
Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics.” He argued that historians may
best understand the Gilded Age by analyzing it in terms of the modes of production at
play in the economy. For the author, the Gilded Age commenced in 1873 and ended in
1898. He used 1873 as the beginning because it was at that point, he maintained, that the
nation witnessed marked shifts in the nature of what he termed the “dominant mix of
production.” It was at this point that the nation experienced the emergence of surplus as
a national problem. He set the end of the Gilded Age at 1898 because that was when
ideas of “new liberalism” took hold in national discussions. 62
In her 2009 article, “Politics, Social Movements, and the Periodization of U.S.
History,” Rebecca Edwards argued that historians should abolish the “Gilded Age” as a
separate periodization and instead adopt the idea of a “Long Progressive Era” dating from
61
Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in
America, 1870-1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003),; 2-5.
62
Schneirov, “Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded Age,” 189-191, 194, 198-204.
173
1870 to 1920. 63 In her book, New Spirits, Edwards argued that the period should date
from 1865 to 1905, so her article offered a slightly altered measure of periodization. 64
Edwards pointed out that the Gilded Age construct is not useful because, however
defined, it leaves out too much that necessarily must be included. It failed to include
movements that had the same characteristics as those that historians are comfortable in
labeling “progressive.” This extension of the narrative would allow the Grange,
Greenbackers, Farmers’ Alliances, and women to correctly be viewed as progressive.
Edwards also acknowledged that the term “progressive” needs to take into account events
that occurred during the era, but that were not progressive. These include the
disenfranchisement of African American voters, immigrant restriction, segregation,
women’s rights, and unstable labor relations. 65
As Elisabeth Perry made clear in her discussion of women, the inclusion of oncemarginalized groups forced scholars to take a new look at certain ubjects and questions. 66
When scholars introduce disability and the role of individuals with disabilities into the
analysis the lens must be broader. As was the case with race and gender, when scholars
use disability as a distinct category of analysis the traditional periodization schemes are
no longer instructive. The traditional frameworks omit the role of disability and of
individuals with physical and mental disabilities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. When disability is introduced as the lens through which scholars view the era,
the traditional dividing points in the chronology are no longer instructive. This
63
Rebecca Edwards, “Politics, Social Movements, and the Periodization of U.S. History,” Journal
of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (October 2009): 463-464.
64
Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905.
65
Edwards, “Politics, Social Movements, and the Periodization of U.S. History,” 465, 469-473.
66
Perry, “Men are from the Gilded Age, Women are from the Progressive Era,” 25-26.
174
dissertation uses 1870 as its starting point because that is when the Ohio State School for
the Blind (OSSB) took on full responsibility for the education of all visually impaired and
blind students in the state. 67 The 1870s also witnessed mass change in the general
education system prompted by several prominent reformers. In 1877, the Ohio
legislature introduced its first compulsory school attendance law. 68 This legislative
mandate ignited a debate over whether students with disabilities were subject to the law.
Following the statute’s enactment, enrollment at the OSSB increased markedly.
However, in the early 1900s, many school districts established segregated sight-saving
classes in the common schools as a means to allow administrators and teachers to
preserve the ideals of order and efficiency. 69
The study ends in1930 for two reasons. First, the Great Depression diverted
public attention away from social issues and toward questions of economics. Second, as
Margaret A. Winzer observed, the 1930s witnessed a “steady evaporation of the optimism
surrounding special education, especially segregated classes.” For advocates of children
with disabilities, the 1930s witnessed a marked shift as evidenced by “mounting
dissatisfaction with inadequately planned special classes staffed by untrained or poorly
trained teachers, watered-down curricula, the total segregation of exceptional students,
and the misinterpretation of the ideology and practice of Progressive education.” As a
result, the role and power of school districts decreased dramatically. At the same time,
67
Ohio State School for the Blind. Annual Report of the Board of Trustees and Officers to the
Governor of the State of Ohio,” (Columbus: State School for the Blind, 1871), 162-167.
68
ORC 3321.01 – 3321.02 (1877).
69
“History of Special Education in Ohio, 1803-1985,” (Worthington, Ohio: State of Ohio
Department of Education, 1987), 1-3.
175
parents and professionals became more vocal in their calls for a complete overhaul of the
system.
The origins of the eugenics movement date back before the traditional narratives
suggest. The eugenics movement in the U.S. was much broader than racial purity, socioeconomic relations, and the forced sterilization of the feebleminded. As progressive
ideals of order and efficiency gained popularity, eugenics required the forced exclusion
and segregation of visually impaired and blind students. As scholars consider the multifaceted nature of the development of both the general education and the special education
systems, they need to extend the opening and closing bookends of the narrative. Until the
mid-1800s, children with disabilities were warehoused in undifferentiated institutions or
they remained home. The trend then became to send them away to the state school that
specialized in their particular disability. The final phase was a transition to the public
schools, but students with disabilities were segregated in special education classes. The
first two phases of the evolution of special education occurred before earlier periodization
schemes mark the rise of the period. 70 To allow individuals with disabilities personal
agency in progressive-era politics, economics, and social dynamics scholars need to push
the end date forward.
Progressive-era reform efforts forever changed the general education and special
education systems in the U.S. The prevailing political, social, and economic view
espoused a clear preference for economically productive, and therefore valuable and
desirable citizens. This was achieved through the outright exclusion of students with
disabilities, and through segregated classes in common schools following Ohio’s
70
Janet Winzer, The History of Special Education: From Isolation to Integration (Washington,
D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1993), 360-364.
176
enactment of its compulsory attendance statute. The separation of disabled students,
whether by exclusion or segregation allowed administrators and teachers to preserve
traditional notions of order and efficiency in the common schools. Special education as a
vehicle to perpetuate the segregationist prong of the eugenics design in the U.S. occurred
in the context of a number of heterogeneous reform-oriented social, administrative, and
pedagogical designs.
Special education allowed administrators and teachers to preserve the progressive
ideals of order and efficiency in common schools through exclusion and segregation of
students with disabilities. Ohio did not eliminate its exclusionary practices with the
passage of its compulsory attendance statute in 1877. Rather, it shifted the means to
intra-district segregation in the form of segregated special education classes. The
segregation of blind and visually impaired students institutionalized and solidified
exclusionary practices and allowed for the preservation of classroom order and efficiency
in the face of changing external pressures. Special education institutionalized the idea of
the “undesirable” student. These classrooms provided an alternative avenue to continue a
tracking system that predetermined which students were more likely to mature into
economically valuable contributors to the expanding industrial state, and therefore
deserving of the full rights and benefits of U.S. citizenship.
177
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