[Dissertation] Segregation or Surgery: The Mentally Retarded in America, 1850-1920

254 Pages·1972·9.238 MB·English

by  Peter Lawrence Tyor

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
SEGREGATION OR SURGERY: THE MENTALLY RETARDED
IN AMERICA, 1850-1920
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
for the degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Field of History
by
PETER LAWRENCE TYOR
Evanston, Illinois
June 1972
X
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I INTRODUCTION .................. . . . 1
II EUROPEAN BEGINNINGS AND AMERICAN
ESTABLISHMENTS 1800-1860 17
III INSTITUTIONAL GROWTH AND
DEVELOPMENT 1850-1875 ................... 44
IV THE EMERGENCE OF CUSTODIALISM
1875-1885 80
V THE BURDEN OF THE FEEBLE-MINDED
1885-1908 124
VI SEGREGATION OR SURGERY
1908-1910 188
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY 232
LIST OF TABLES
Table Page
1 INMATE POPULATIONS IN PUBLIC
.INSTITUTIONS FOR THE .RETARDED . . . . 128
2 NATIVITY OF WHITE PARENTS OF
MASSACHUSETTS INMATES ................ 161
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been given an unreasonable amount of help by
}
kind friends and sympathetic librarians. M. Christine Stone,
librarian of the Walter E. Fernald State School, Waverly,
Massachusetts gave me complete freedom in the Library's
superb collection, as did J. Albert Matkov and James Parla,
State Librarian and Supervisor of Annex respectively, in the
State Library of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, State
House, Boston. Both Libraries permitted me the luxury of
working with their materials in unlimited quantities for
extended durations.
Much assistance was extended to me by Gertrude L. Annan,
Librarian of the New York Academy of Medicine, and her entire
staff. The personnel at the Reference Desk of the New York
Public Library was consistently obliging in the face of my
many inquiries. At the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda,
Maryland, two members of the Reference Services Division,
Daniel T. Richards and Joseph Forrest, gave me a great deal of
their time and knowledge as well as directing me to their
counterparts at the Library of Congress.
Two colleagues at Northwestern University, John Drodow
and Roger Mitchels, bore the brunt of assisting me in the
preparation of the manuscript. I am most grateful for their
untiring efforts. My wife, Hilary, supplied love and silence
<*>
when each was appropriate. I alone am responsible for the
finished manuscript, and for any and all errors.
Peter Lawrence Tyor
Evanston, Illinois
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Incidents of organized repression have punctuated all
of America's past.. Such episodes--ranging from the Salem
witch trials to the Indian extermination campaigns and the
inquisitions of the McCarthy era— have varied in scope, inten­
sity and duration. Seldom, however, have unanimity of opinion,
quality of leadership and severity of reaction combined so
successfully as in our treatment of the feeble-minded'*' during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With
growing accord, physicians, scientists and criminologists
condemned the feeble-minded as social parasites and failures.
Calling for sterilization or segregation, they led the outcry
to prevent the feeble-minded from inflicting disaster on future
generations.
This was a dramatic change from the optimistic pre-Civil
War conceptions of mental disabilities. The apparent success
of moral treatment for the insane had encouraged many asylum
superintendents to proclaim that insanity was the most curable
^This term may offend some modern readers, but it was the most widely
used scientific term in the period 1865-1920. Feeble-minded, like its
antecedent, idiocy, refers to those who today are described as mentally
handicapped or retarded. When discussing the views of those in the past,
I shall use the terms with which they would have expressed themselves.
2
of diseases. The early educational work of Dr. Samuel G.
3
Howe with idiots promis ed equally rewarding resuIts. Despite
the expansion of ins t i tutiona1 facilities and the growth of
prof essional societies,^ the hopes of the humani tarian reformers
were not fully reali zed . The feeble-minded were never educated
to the point where they could completely provide for themselves.
Like other objects of reform, the feeble-minded lingered in
ins titutions which , like asy 1urns and penitentiar ies, had been
designed to transform and discharge them.
The failure of the educational ideal and the slow conver­
sion to custodial institutions cannot fully account for the
antipathy expressed toward the feeble-minded from 1890 onward.
This problem has been examined by a number of scholars. One
of the earliest works, Social Control of the Feebleminded by
Stanley P. Davies, established a pattern of explanation followed
2
There is a growing body of literature on insanity in this period.
See: Norman Dain, Concepts of Insanity in the United States, 1789-1865
(New Brunswick, 1964); Gerald N. Grob, The State and the Mentally 111
(Chapel Hill, 1966); Ruth B. Caplan, Psychiatry and Community in Nineteenth
Century America (New York, 1969); and J. Sanbourne Bockoven, Moral Treat­
ment in American Psychiatry (New York, 1963).
3
See: Harold Schwartz, Samuel Gridley Howe, Social Reformer, 1801-
1876 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1956).
^From Howe's first school in the Perkins Institute for the Blind
established in 1848, to 1892, nineteen public institutions for the feeble­
minded were founded. A contemporary view can be found in Walter E. Fernald,
"The History of the Treatment of the Feeble-Minded," Proceedings of the
National Conference of Corrections and Charities, XX (1893), 203-222 (here­
after cited as N.C.C.C.)
by later authors."* Davies believed:
Two factors were mainly responsible for this rather
suddenly aroused and widespread concern about a
problem which had theretofore existed without any
general public notice. These factors were:
1. The development of the eugenics movement together
with the rediscovery of the Mendelian laws of
heredity and resulting heredity studies.
2. The development and application of the Binet-
Simon method of intelligence testing.”
Although indicating that advances in biology, genetics and
psychology were primarily responsible, Davies implied that
the frame of mind both of the scientific community and the
wider society played a major role.
Eugenics thrived in the turn of the century enthusiasm
for race and heredity that had been sparked by Darwin.
Arguing that society had interfered with the process of natural
selection by preserving inferior stocks through misguided pub­
lic charity, eugenicists were concerned for the continued
survival of the race. Those officials most familiar with these
debilitating agents--the insane, feeble-minded, alcoholics,
paupers--had always considered heredity as one of many likely
causes. Although Robert Dugdale's pioneering study The Jukes
Davies actually succeeded himself, revising and reissuing his
work as: Social Control of the Mentally Deficient (New York, 1930); and
as The Mentally Retarded in Society (New York, 1958).
^Stanley P. Davies, Social Control of the feebleminded (New York,
1923), p. 37.
4
had balanced the forces of heredity and environment; other
commentators had placed unwarranted emphasis on inherited
defect. As Davies pointed out, the rediscovery of Mendel's
laws made possible numerous studies cloaked in the mantle
of science, that proved feeble-mindedness and other social
g
problems had predominantly hereditarian origins.
Importation of the Binet-Simon method of intelligence
testing by Dr. Henry H. Goddard in 1908 permitted a more
accurate assessment of the feeble-mindeds1 mental capacities.
Professional custodians and eugenicists, using representative
sampling techniques, now had the means to estimate the per­
centage of the feeble-minded at large in the community. They
found it alarmingly high. Only one link in the chain of
causal thinking that indicted the congenitally feeble-minded
as major social menaces was lacking. Next tested were the
known social failures already in institutions— criminals,
paupers, alcoholics— and a large proportion of them proved
feeble-minded. Davies summarized, "The more thoroughly the
mental defective was searched for and found, the more completely
was he apparently involved in all manner of offences against
7
First published in A Record and Study of the Relations of Crime,
Pauperism and Disease, Prison Association of New York, Annual Reports,
XXXI (1875), it was.the best known study of abnormal families and went
through four editions by 1910.
O
Davies, Social Control, pp. 37-42.
^Ibid., pp. 43-55.