Signs of the Times

ED AYERS: But this tension isn’t just confined to sideshows. It runs through lots of history of disability in America. Able-bodied Americans have often projected their fears, anxieties and stereotypes onto their fellow citizens with disabilities, many of whom, in turn, have worked to find their own means of social and civic mobility.

BRIAN BALOGH: Today on the show, a history of physical disability in America. We’ll explore how enslaved people used fear of disability to their advantage and find out why Alexander Graham Bell fought against the use of sign language within the deaf community. We’ll also hear from voices of protest in the 20th century fight for disability civil rights.

ED AYERS: But, first, let’s take a look at how views of disability have shaped who has been granted access to the U.S. in the first place. Since the founding, politicians have used the term “able-bodied” to define civic participation. By the 1880s, lawmakers begin to focus on those coming into the country.

In 1882, federal immigration law barred anyone who was a “convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of him or herself without becoming a public charge” from entering the country. That list included children and adults with any number of physical disabilities or perceived defects.

DOUG BAYNTON: The list would include varicose veins, flat feet, hearing impairment, vision impairments, short stature, poor physique.

ED AYERS: This is University of Iowa historian Douglas Baynton. He says it’s hard to tell exactly how many immigrants with disabilities were kept out of the U.S. For one thing, discrimination didn’t begin at Ellis Island.

DOUG BAYNTON: Because the shipping companies did their own inspections, because if they brought an immigrant over who was rejected, they would have to pay a fine for that person, and they would have to bring them back at no charge. The ticket sellers, the ticket agents, who were spread all over Europe, also did their own inspections. These were non-medical people, but they would refuse to sell tickets to people who they thought would be excluded, because they would be penalized by the shipping companies.

ED AYERS: And what this suggests to me is that people with really debilitating disabilities might not have made it this far.

DOUG BAYNTON: Oh, that’s right, yeah. Well, they wouldn’t have gotten through the initial screens, and also if they had a mobility impairment, they wouldn’t be able to get on the ship in the first place.

ED AYERS: Right, right. So, can you give me an example of what this process actually looked like in practice, these officials deciding sort of on the spur of the moment that somebody was defective?

DOUG BAYNTON: There was an Armenian Turk in 1905 by the name of Donabet Mousekian who was diagnosed as suffering from feminism. That was the term that was used on his medical certificate, and it referred to a lack of male sexual organs or underdeveloped organs as a result of what we now know to be a hormonal deficiency.

ED AYERS: I mean, how would they know that? It must have been from a facial trait?

DOUG BAYNTON: Yes.

ED AYERS: Because I know from reading your article that, basically, people are walking by and when they see somebody who seems defective, they write an “L” on their back. Is that right?

DOUG BAYNTON: Right, there was a whole code for different kinds of defects. So, “X” for mental defect, “L” for lame.

So, the first inspection was really just a snapshot diagnosis as immigrants streamed past the inspectors, and they would pull some people out, chalk on their back, and then give them a closer inspection.

So, with Mousekian, his hearing was extraordinarily brief. It was as if the board that was examining him was very uncomfortable, and, this case, one of them said, “I move to exclude as likely to become a public charge.” Second panel member said, “I second the motion,” and a third said, “He is excluded.”

ED AYERS: Oh, wow.

DOUG BAYNTON: And that was the entire hearing. But he appealed to Washington, which all immigrants had the right to do, and he wrote in his appeal that he had always supported himself. He was a photographer, a weaver and dyer of rugs, and a cook, had worked at all of these.

And he wrote in his letter, “I am not ill and have no contagious disease. This is not my fault. It has come from God and my mother. What harm can I do by being deprived of male organs?”

When he left, he was fleeing the violent oppression of Armenians in Turkey, and had been made to renounce his citizenship when he left. So, he explained this in his letter, and he said, “Better that you should kill me now than send me back,” and the Armenian genocide took place just a few years after he was sent back.

ED AYERS: Wow.

ED AYERS: So much of this focused around not being able to find work.

DOUG BAYNTON: [Yes].

ED AYERS: What kind of evidence would they have of that? Was that actually true, do you think?

DOUG BAYNTON: That’s the thing. There is a widespread assumption that a disability means being incapable of working. So, in the case of Mousekian, there really seems to be no reason to assume he wouldn’t be able to find work. But there was an immigration service memo that explained why they should not be admitted, which was that their abnormality becomes known to their fellow workers, who mock them and taunt them, which impedes the work—

ED AYERS: [laughs]

DOUG BAYNTON: —at hand, and so employers know this and are unlikely to hire them.

ED AYERS: So, it’s for their own good in many ways? [laughs]

DOUG BAYNTON: Yeah, right. So, basically, it was saying that, “We have to discriminate against them now because they’re likely to encounter discrimination later.”

ED AYERS: So, you say that these restrictions grew over time. Does that mean that they grew increasingly accepted? Was there a sort of turn against people with disabilities at the beginning of the 20th century, or was this just sort of a more bureaucratic momentum that built?

DOUG BAYNTON: Well, I think there are a couple of things going on. One, the eugenics movement definitely grew. And it was not just in the negative sense, of preventing defectives from giving birth, but encouraging people who considered to be superior to have more children.

So, sterilization was one way of preventing the proliferation of “defective” people. The other main track that eugenicists took was to prevent defective people from coming into the country. They would argue that all of our sterilizing and institutionalizing of people is not going to do any good if we’re just being swamped with defective people from the outside.

ED AYERS: So, this just seems to be running contrary to what we think of as the currents of sensibility and progress. We think of abolitionism, and feminism, and a general sensitivity to the suffering of animals, and everything… seems to be flourishing in the 19th century. Why would people with disabilities seem to be exceptions to that general trend?

DOUG BAYNTON: Well, I think there are a lot of different factors. One of them is this standardization of society in the industrial age. The term “normal” comes into common use near the end of the 19th century, and it becomes a very powerful concept. People used to talk about human nature, and then it shifted around the turn of the 20th century to a concern with what is normal: counting people, measuring people, seeing what the bell curve shows us about what are normal characteristics.

And it’s tied in with a lot of changes: the growth of cities, industrialization where not only do you need standardized parts and replaceable parts, but standardized and replaceable human beings, workers. People with disabilities don’t fit as a cog in that larger machine.

ED AYERS: So, how long were these laws on the books? You say they sort of peak in the early 20th century. Then what happened?

DOUG BAYNTON: The immigration laws do not take out the language having to do with specific disabilities or defects that are excludable until the 1990 Act, and still today we exclude people who are likely to become a public charge, and that’s still a means of keeping people out with disabilities. So, it still goes on.

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ED AYERS: Douglas Baynton is a historian at the University of Iowa and author of the forthcoming book Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics.

Earlier, we heard from historian Jenifer Barclay at Washington State University, and actor and performer Mat Fraser.