Disability Across the Centuries

BRIAN BALOGH: We just heard about the laws in the 19th century that targeted disability among immigrants, but attitudes at that time affected plenty of Americans, as well. Our story starts with Alexander Graham Bell, who we all know as a hero for his invention of the telephone in 1876, but Bell was also one of the most influential figures in the field of deaf education. He had a deep personal connection to the issue. Both his mother and his wife were deaf.

BRIAN GREENWALD: But the signing deaf community has viewed Bell as a villain.

BRIAN BALOGH: This is Brian Greenwald, a historian at Gallaudet University. I spoke to him through a sign language interpreter. Greenwald says that in the late 19th century, Bell used his fame to try to eradicate sign language, which he viewed as primitive. Bell was one of the more prominent activists who promoted a different form of communication for the deaf, known as oralism.

BRIAN GREENWALD: Oralism is a pedagogical approach to teaching deaf children, which relies on teaching them speech training, lip reading, and eliminating the use of sign language, the idea being that deaf children would be recast as hearing, speaking people.

BRIAN BALOGH: Why did Bell think that oralism was more advanced, or why did he think that American Sign Language was more primitive?

BRIAN GREENWALD: This is an era when sign became viewed as atavistic, backwards thinking. That it was a bumbling use of gesture to convey information in a way that wasn’t a good fit for human nature, as it was seen.

In terms of evolutionary thinking of the day, people regarded sign, and those who used sign, as being somewhat closer to the use of gesture among, say, monkeys, and the idea being that if you could not speak, you could not think, and were not human.

So, for Bell, working to eliminate sign language, I think, was really a kind of reform, as he saw it. A progressive reform.

BRIAN BALOGH: Greenwald told me that in the late 19th century, there were several dozen boarding schools for the deaf where students were taught sign language. The schools, and signing, had created the beginnings of Deaf culture.

BRIAN GREENWALD: My belief is that Bell saw oralism as a social and educational pressure that could be applied to deaf people so that they would leave that cultural community, because he thought that deaf people should not be marrying other deaf people.

BRIAN BALOGH: Why? Bell was a eugenicist.

BRIAN GREENWALD: Bell was very, very much so worried that if deaf people continued to marry among other deaf people then there would be, at some point, a new variety of the human race that would be deaf. But we know today that that theory doesn’t hold true.

But the overarching goal for Bell was to reduce the number of deaf people in existence. Now, the way to reduce those numbers of deaf people, he thought, and his argument was through oralism as a tool for assimilation.

BRIAN BALOGH: Was there anybody who pushed back against Bell in order to defend that culture?

BRIAN GREENWALD: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, very much so, even within the schools for the deaf where sign language was forbidden or not used. Those deaf students would spontaneously sign on the sly, and if the teacher had their back turned to write on the board at any moment, the students were communicating with each other using signs and doing so in the dormitories, as well.

Other acts of resistance—and really a very important one to remember—is that when those deaf children graduated from those schools, they continued to gather in deaf communities within churches, within deaf clubs, within different organizations, and the number of deaf-related organizations on local, state, and national levels are astounding.

But oralists were like a tidal wave in that era that just swept across the United States, and part of the problem was that the oralists had never asked deaf adults—

BRIAN BALOGH: [laughs]

BRIAN GREENWALD: —about their own [laughs] experiences, and so deaf children of that day, and still today, continue to get the short end of the educational experience.

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BRIAN BALOGH: Brian Greenwald is a historian at Gallaudet University.

Despite efforts to suppress signing, the language thrived throughout the 20th century, largely through those methods of resistance Greenwald mentioned. Schools today teach American Sign Language, lip reading, and speech.

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