A Disability History of the United States (22 page)

Doctors routinely encouraged parents to institutionalize their children with mental retardation in the postwar period, and at their encouragement many parents never mentioned or acknowledged such children again. Physicians and psychologists warned parents that the immense needs of such a child would ruin marriages and destroy the lives of other children in the household. Many parents followed this advice. The famed child psychoanalyst Erik Erickson and his wife, Joan, institutionalized their child after he was born, telling their other children that he had died at birth.
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Despite this incredible social pressure, and the dire predictions of medical professionals, some parents began to organize and advocate on behalf of their children and their families—rejecting the social stigma associated with cognitive disabilities.
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Parents, in essence, came out of the closet and brought national attention to the lack of appropriate educational options, living options, and family support. In 1950 author Pearl Buck, the only female ever to receive the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize, published
The Child Who Never Grew,
about her daughter Carol. Buck presented Carol not as shameful but as an innocent and joyful child. Similarly, in 1953 television and movie star and evangelical Christian Dale Evans published
Angel Unaware—
about her cognitively disabled daughter Robin, who had died at two years of age. Robin, she said, was not a punishment: instead, she was a gift from God, sent to “strengthen us spiritually and to draw us closer together in the knowledge and love and fellowship of God.” Eugenicist claims that cognitive disabilities represented defective family genes were even more publicly challenged when the Kennedy family embraced the cause of mental retardation and (at least some of them) acknowledged Rosemarie Kennedy, the cognitively disabled sister of President Kennedy. In 1962 Eunice Shriver Kennedy, another Kennedy sister, wrote in
The Saturday Evening Post,
“Mental retardation can happen in any family. It
has
happened in the families of the poor and the rich, of governors, senators, Nobel prizewinners, doctors, lawyers, writers, men of genius, presidents of corporations—the president of the United States.”
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Parent groups in many states, most often energized and staffed by volunteer mothers, eventually merged to form the National Association for Retarded Children in 1952. By 1964 their membership exceeded one hundred thousand people—nearly all of them parents. Minnesota mothers, like many mothers across the nation, became professional and astute lobbyists: they befriended the female secretaries of the male legislators as they sought sway, and in 1963 took legislative wives on a tour of state hospitals. In 1974 the organization changed its name to become the National Association for Retarded Citizens, attempting to reject the assumption that people with cognitive disabilities were perpetual children. In 1992 the national organization became simply The Arc, in an effort to recognize the organizational leadership and involvement of those individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities as well as to rid itself of the term “mental retardation.”
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Parent advocate groups changed the institutional and educational landscapes of people with cognitive disabilities, as did a number of sensationalized media exposés. Stories that brought to light the horrific conditions at institutions for people with disabilities were not new. Dorothea Dix had used a similar strategy in the 1840s and 1850s. Journalist Nellie Bly had kicked off her career by deceiving her way into the infamous insane asylum of Blackwell’s Island and then writing about it in
Ten Days in a Madhouse
(1888).

In the mid- to late 1940s, activists—many of them accidental activists—shone a spotlight on the horrific conditions, squalidness, and brutality within American institutions for people with psychiatric and intellectual disabilities. The onset of World War II had stripped such institutions of much of their staff. Many men went to war, and those who did not, as well as female employees, often found better-paying employment, with better working conditions, in wartime defense plants. At the same time, the federal government sought placements for the nearly twelve thousand World War II conscientious objectors assigned to public service. Nearly three thousand were assigned to state mental hospitals and training schools containing an array of people with cognitive and developmental disabilities.

As disability scholar Steven Taylor has characterized it, their work was hard: “Ten hour days were commonplace. As few as 1 to 3 men were in charge of as many as 350 patients, including those individuals with the most severe disabilities.” The common use of physical restraints and brutality challenged “the humanitarian and pacifist beliefs” of many of the conscientious objectors. Shaken by their experiences and determined to bring about social change, the young men brought institutional conditions to the attention of local media, community leaders, academics, and prominent Americans in popular culture and politics. Their experiences were documented in a 1947 book,
Out of Sight, Out of Mind,
compiled by Frank Leon Wright; it was praised by Eleanor Roosevelt in her “My Day” newspaper column. With photographs and beautiful prose, it forced attention to the brutality, cruelty, neglect, and disdain that were the everyday experience of too many institutionalized Americans.
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Christmas in Purgatory
(1966) became an even more successful exposé. Burton Blatt, a professor at Boston University, and his friend, photographer Fred Kaplan, visited four large New England state institutions for people with psychiatric and cognitive disabilities, after Senator Robert Kennedy’s unexpected but highly publicized visit to two New York institutions in 1965. The pair secretly took pictures and published them as a photographic exposé. The stark black-and-white images of
Christmas in Purgatory
remain disturbing to this day: naked or half-dressed individuals in crowded and barren environments, the common use of physical restraints simply to relieve staff of care obligations, and the jarringly casual disregard for fellow human beings. Blatt hoped for reform, especially after being invited to address the Massachusetts legislature convened at one of the state schools.
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By 1979, however, Blatt had given up on reform. He bluntly concluded, “We must evacuate the institutions for the mentally retarded.”
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Blatt and others would expand the push for deinstitutionalization.

During World War II, those on the home front expected to be asked to sacrifice. They grew their own food, ate meatless meals, did without silk, recycled tin, often moved into new fields of employment, sent letters and care packages to soldiers they loved, and mourned those who died. Industry and the federal government worked together to staff the ever-growing wartime industrial needs. The African American community, whose young men went off to war, questioned how they could be asked to give lives in sacrifice while being allowed only limited and segregated access to wartime industrial employment and civil rights. Able-bodied white women wondered the same.

World War II had profound impact on the disabled community as a whole. Even though wartime federal policies were ostensibly designed to meet labor needs, they sometimes had the ironic consequence of driving people with disabilities away from the workplace—regardless of race or sex. Simultaneously, however, other government and industrial policies encouraged the employment of people with disabilities in order to meet the wartime crisis demands. And like other wars before it, World War II expanded the ranks of Americans with disabilities.

In October 1942, as Germany began the assault on Stalingrad and US troops landed on Guadalcanal, Bay Crockett, of Pueblo, Colorado, sought help from President Roosevelt. Crockett, who had broken his back in 1918, used crutches, and could not walk for more than a block, supported his wife and child and had done so for quite a while. His success as a provider, which understandably made him proud, required a car. What could he do, he asked his president, when his work travel required more gas-rationing coupons than he had? Like many others with mobility disabilities, he feared losing his job as an unexpected result of World War II’s tire and gasoline rationing. How could he, who could not walk to work, continue to support his wife and child? Could he and others in similar circumstances have extra gas allowance?
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Victor Lee of Los Altos, California, similarly asked, “What is to happen to the invalid under the tire rationing program?” Trains, buses, and streetcars, he knew, were not accessible. “It seems to me,” he went on, “that in authentic cases of invalidism certified by a registered physician an exception might be made to permit the purchase of tires for cars owned by such persons. No great amount of new rubber would be involved in making life at least endurable for such people whose pleasures are at best few.”
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After being sent back and forth between local and state appeal boards several times in her efforts to acquire new car tires, Julia O’Brien also wrote to FDR’s office, with great frustration. She appealed to FDR because, as she put it, “you know what it means to have your wings clipped.” Due to polio at age five, O’Brien was unable to walk. For over twenty-one years she had taught English and chaired the English Department at a local school, leading “a busy, active life.” “This would not be possible,” she wrote, “if I couldn’t get around in a car.” In fall 1942 her tires had already traveled over forty thousand miles. She feared that any day her tires would “blow” and that she would have “no redress.” It infuriated her that during her appeals process each of her requests had been denied and a clerk had glibly given her “some platudinous remarks about the need for sacrifice in time of war.”
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“Sacrifice,” she proclaimed, “I think I know the meaning of the word! For twenty-eight years I have met the competition in my field and naturally had never asked nor received special consideration because of my lameness.” In a later letter, after again being denied an additional tire ration, she wrote, “As I start the new school year, I rather envy the defense workers to whom the rationing boards are so rational. This is truly a man’s world; and we women can be pardoned for saying, ‘What a mess they are making of it!’”
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When employment was needed and encouraged, wartime rationing policies hindered people with disabilities from continuing in the employment that sustained their households and contributed to their communities. How many people were affected is unclear. Government employment programs, public and private relief agencies, and the general public—even when faced with direct contrary evidence—tended to assume that people with disabilities did not and could not work for wages. These policies that resulted in discouraging people with disabilities from employment existed simultaneously with federal and industrial efforts to bring people with disabilities into the wage workforce—again, built on the erroneous assumption that people with disabilities were not already working for wages.

During World War II, however, “when an exceptional demand for labor arose, there was a significant increase in the employment of disabled workers who compiled impressive records of productivity.” As men and women left private employment for government and military service during the war, and as wartime industrial needs expanded exponentially, government agencies began to encourage the employment of people with disabilities. Government employment-agency placement of people with disabilities “rose from 28,000 in 1940 to 300,000 in 1945”; between 1940 and 1950, placements numbered almost 2 million.
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Private agencies joined the effort as well.

As early as 1942, the Society for Crippled Children of Cleveland, Ohio (which later became Easter Seals), encouraged using “the physically disabled” as “an important source of labor supply for the all-out war effort.” Its Cleveland Placement Bureau, the society went on, was already placing “eight out of every ten seriously handicapped men and women” in “useful jobs in industry.” Before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the society admitted, its employment placement programs had generally been considered “community services for the disabled.” After Pearl Harbor, however, the efforts met the patriotic and wartime needs of the nation. Employment placement programs for people with disabilities had much larger meaning. “Handicapped men and women,” the article explained, “must be prepared to take the places of those called for active military service. They must be trained to fill the many new jobs in the factories turning out the planes, tanks, and guns needed for Democracy and Freedom.”
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The nation needed its disabled citizens.

The Cleveland Placement Bureau touted the case of John Millard. Millard, it was explained, “had not been able to find a job in industry for eight years because no concern seemed interested in hiring a man with two artificial legs.” A local employer hired Millard in an assembly line at the recommendation of the bureau. He proved such “an efficient workman” that “five other handicapped persons have been added to this department.” For Millard, with a wife and six children, the job must have been both a relief and a thrill. Other success stories included “a girl with a back deformity” who stood out as “one of the outstanding workers in a large factory producing signal equipment for the Navy.” A man “with both hands deformed since birth” tested metals for Army transport trucks, and “a boy on crutches” drafted plane plans.
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For many people with disabilities, wartime employment provided great pride, national service in the midst of a national crisis, and a solid and reliable income. May Curtis, a deaf alumnus of Gallaudet College, worked both on the fuselages of B-29s and as a typist for the Pentagon. When interviewed by contemporary blind activist and poet Kathi Wolf, she proclaimed, “It’s not in the history books, but I’m the deaf Rosie!”
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