Why I Burned My Book: And Other Essays on Disability

288 Pages·2003·0.713 MB·English

by  Paul K. Longmore

W H Y I B U R N E D M Y B O O K
AND OTHER ESSAYS ON DISABILITY
In the series
American Subjects
edited byRobert Dawidoff
W H Y I B U R N E D
M Y B O O K
AND OTHER ESSAYS
ON DISABILITY
Paul K. Longmore
Temple University Press
PHILADELPHIA
To Carol and Larry
Mentors, Comrades, Friends
Temple University Press, Philadelphia 19122
Copyright © 2003 by Temple University
All rights reserved
Published 2003
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Longmore, Paul K.
Why I burned my book and other essays on disability/Paul K. Longmore.
p. cm. — (American subjects)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-59213-023-2 (cloth:alk. paper) — ISBN 1-59213-024-0 (pbk.:alk. paper)
1.People with disabilities—United States—History. 2.People with disabilities—
Civil rights—United States—History. 3.Sociology of disability—United States.
4.People with disabilities in motion pictures. I.Title. II.Series.
HV1568.L662003
305.9′0816′0973—dc21
2002035272
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
Contents
Foreword by Robert Dawidoff vii
Introduction 1
ONE Analyses and Reconstructions
1 Disability Watch 19
2 The Life of Randolph Bourne and the Need for
a History of Disabled People 32
3 Uncovering the Hidden History of Disabled People 41
4 The League of the Physically Handicapped
and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the
New Disability History 53
5 The Disability Rights Moment:
Activism in the 1970s and Beyond 102
TWO Images and Reflections
6 Film Reviews 119
7 Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People
in Television and Motion Pictures 131
THREE Ethics and Advocacy
8 Elizabeth Bouvia, Assisted Suicide,
and Social Prejudice 149
v
vi Contents
9 The Resistance: The Disability Rights Movement
and Assisted Suicide 175
10 Medical Decision Making and People
with Disabilities: A Clash of Cultures 204
FOUR Protests and Forecasts
11 The Second Phase: From Disability Rights
to Disability Culture 215
12 Princeton and Peter Singer 225
13 Why I Burned My Book 230
Index 261
Foreword
W
hy do so many of us see disability as a frightening subject? Perhaps
because it seems to force upon us an awareness of the precariousness of
the human condition. Race, gender, sexuality, class and other commonly
addressed forms of human difference share a certain permanence, which
may be why the transgendered, the bisexual, and the mixed race or eth-
nicity person still challenge our accustomed categories of understand-
ing and action. The study of disability, however, challenges our uncom-
fortable, if usually repressed, awareness that anyone can become disabled
and that the greater life expectancy some of us enjoy extends the risk and
perhaps increases the odds that one will. We regard disability as a kind
of memento mori,except that we take it as reminding us of a difficult and
torturous life rather than the inevitability of death. Yet as Paul Long-
more shows, the disabled different is not simply natural, but embedded
in law and custom and belief. His essays explore the paradoxical effects
of attempts to “help” people with disabilities at the same time society
and culture maintain a false distinction between their “abnormal” bod-
ies and minds and our putatively healthy normal ones.
I have worked with Paul Longmore since he was a graduate student
in history at the Claremont Graduate University. His disability was a
logistical element in our work together, one his essay “Why I Burned
My Book” recounts. The challenges his disability presented to his grad-
uate study included the perverse social-service system that had so little
understanding of the individuals it was created to “serve,” posing in-
stead what seemed to us at the time obstacles to his real purpose, the
study of history. The thought of his disability as a substantive issue, one
that deserved his historical and analytic attention, began to form, as he
recounts in his concluding essay, into a scholarly and active concern as
vii
viii Foreword
the immediate demands of his graduate education receded, and he was
doing the work he was meant to do. As a historian, he had begun to re-
flect on the issue of disability with his brilliant essay about Randolph
Bourne (reprinted here). In the years since, he has developed into one
of the nation’s original and leading historians of disability.
Simultaneously, Longmore assumed an active role in the struggles of
people with disabilities against discrimination, ill treatment, bad laws,
and an interlocking set of notions masquerading as informed ideas. He
also began to speak and write as an activist. He initially hesitated to as-
semble this volume because he was not sure that his writings as a scholar
and as an activist could be understood together, that his activist writing
might be confused with his scholarship. While it is not hard to under-
stand this unease, since so much genuinely groundbreaking scholarship
in areas that require contemporary as well as historical attention has
been dismissed as “politics,” it was this very quality that made this col-
lection the very thing for this series. The point of doing the American
Subjects series has been to present neglected subjects of our national
story and to preserve the related narrative of how they come into being.
It is hard to imagine a better account of a subject and how one comes to
it as scholar, citizen, and reader than Why I Burned My Book.This col-
lection rediscovers the historicity of disability and illuminates the sub-
ject position of disabled people as elements of our common history and
humanity. The activism that has made Paul Longmore so important to
the disability rights movement partners his scholarship. The arguments
in such action-oriented essays as “The Resistance: The Disability Rights
Movement and Assisted Suicide” take root in Longmore’s scholarship.
The truths he has discovered about disability as an American historical
subject require forceful presentation to gain a hearing from an academic
and reading public that resists the subject position of disabled people.
In the main, his essays inform us about people with disabilities as a
group covered by laws, misrepresented by culture, and prey to a com-
plex of social and political attitudes, and as individuals, whether Ran-
dolph Bourne or Elizabeth Bouvia, who experience those conditions.
Especially important is his essay “The League of the Physically Hand-
icapped and the Great Depression,” which gives historians a model of
“the new disability history”; along with “Uncovering the Hidden His-
tory of Disabled People,” it demonstrates how the history of disability
is done and why it should be studied. Longmore explains why histori-
ans must attend to the subject of disability and be prepared to find that
Foreword ix
the history of the marginalization and misunderstanding of disabled peo-
ple is central to the history of the United States and suggests powerful
reconsiderations of American society.
Among the many qualities Longmore brings to his writing is his witty
and comprehensive approach to American popular culture. Attitudes
toward people with disabilities take hold in popular and elite culture,
making Longmore’s placing of disabled people smack-dab in the mid-
dle of American culture of signal interest. He is careful to show how
that culture operated within him and affected his own professional prac-
tice. He brings the varied work of scholars across the disciplines to bear,
with the result that we can see the subject from more than the historian’s
perspective. History in the professional sense is importantly here in these
essays. But history as the Founders understood it, the “experience”
which they relied upon to guide their fateful decisions, as Douglass Adair
memorably phrased it, is here too. We need them both.
I remember when Paul burned his book. I was shocked by this bril-
liantly conceived symbolic act until I tried to understand why he had
done it. In that moment, I began to understand why disability studies
andthe activism of resistance are each and both the proper work of a his-
torian like Paul Longmore. He is a rare example of the historian whose
scholarly conscience pervades all his writing. He was, to use an old-
fashioned term,calledto his vocation as a historian. His subjects here are
what a transdisciplinary subject and a human condition both require.
When you read this book, you will understand not only why he burned
that book but why he has written this one.
Robert Dawidoff