A second rationalization for our treatment of people with severe disability relates to their perceived moral failure. Perceptions of moral failure, as one sociologist termed it, have us responding to people as social dynamite, who must be kept from blowing up, or social junk, people who need humane disposal. First, let's look at the concept of social dynamite.
This concept is probably most frequently associated with the eugenics period. which emerged in the late nineteenth century and really got going in the early twentieth century a popular belief during this period was that mental retardation and mental illness were totally genetic and the root cause of all social ills poverty drunkenness prostitution crime violence this belief suggested that the appropriate social response was to segregate or sterilize if not kill all of these people so that they couldn't reproduce their evil habits their moral failure, if you will. You see this notion of social dynamite in stories from the 1920s and 30s about the danger of having people with mental retardation in the community. This official government brochure out of Cincinnati was called the feeble-minded or the hub to our wheel of vice, crime, and pauperism. People who commit arson, murder, or other acts of violence would often be drawn to suggest the presence of mental retardation.
You see this popular notion reflected in some of the classification books and professional texts about diagnoses of mental retardation from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sometimes professionals couldn't establish through IQ tests that a person was mentally retarded. So they came up with a category called moral imbecile.
Here's an example of a genetic tree from that period. All the F's in the block stand for feeble-mindedness. And again we see the same circular logic that we saw with the judgment of aesthetic failure. The creators of this tree determined that all these ancestors were feeble-minded by asking questions of the so-called feeble-minded members of the present generation. Was your grandpa also poor like you are?
Did he ever get drunk? Was he ever arrested? If they said yes, that was taken as proof that he was also feeble-minded.
Then they would apply their circular logic and say, Look at all these feeble-minded people throughout history who are also associated with evil social habits. Throughout the 18th, 19th, and into the 20th century, an emerging class of professionals claimed the ability not only to diagnose, but also to rehabilitate these moral failures and cure them of their social misbehavior. In the pictures of the more specialized asylums that were being developed in the late 19th century, The so-called idiot asylums, you see the theme of rehabilitation through physical regimen and control still being pursued.
These boys are being returned to the height of middle class respectability by wearing neckties during calisthenics. And the girls wear scarves during dance class. One of the things you never see in these photographs are men and women, or boys and girls, together at these institutions. Administrators wanted to send a clear message. that they keep the sexes apart for moral purity, to control the base instincts of the residents.
It's important to remember that these pictures were taken for public relations purposes to cast the institution in the best possible light. The story of the Kalakak family is a classic example of the before and after stories to come out of this eugenics period. A psychologist named Henry Goddard claimed to have traced the family lineage of a woman He called Deborah Calicak, the name Calicak being created from the Greek words for good and evil. Deborah Calicak had been admitted to Vineland Asylum in New Jersey where Goddard worked.
First, Goddard gave us a picture of the untreated relatives of Deborah. Then he presented a picture of Deborah Calicak after her institutionalization at Vineland. Every aspect of the photo is calculated to present this image of respectability.
to show what could be accomplished if institutions were just given control of these people. As you can see, moral behavior and personal appearance are linked. This is a before and after picture from one of the institution's publications that's meant to demonstrate through changed appearance the moral improvement of the subject. In this picture, the inscription says, Helen Yu, November 1914, age 8.4 years.
Note the normal expression of embarrassment and coyness. And in this picture, Helen Yu, November 1916, age 10.4. four years, compare with her preceding portrait and note development. Notice they rehabilitated that smirk off of her face. As mentioned earlier, people judged as moral failures were considered to be either social dynamite, and therefore inclined to go out and commit crimes unless you rehabilitated them, or they were considered social junk.
In the latter case, they were thought to be so retarded, so disabled, that they were beyond help. and a moral burden that had to be disposed of. This thinking led to the development of back wards in the institutions.
This picture is taken from the Rome State Custodial Asylum for Unteachable Idiots. The name says it all. It was the place for those who were to be abandoned to their fate.
As you can see in this photo, people of all ages resided in these institutions. But they were all referred to as children, whether they were three or four, or in their thirties or forties. They would spend their entire days in these large day rooms with nothing to do but sit and sleep. And they would never leave that single building.
The only reason these pictures were taken, by the way, was so that the superintendent could make a case for overcrowding with the legislature. It was a tricky balance. On the one hand, he wanted to say we're doing a wonderful job, give us more money.
But at the same time, he wanted to convey we're awfully overcrowded. You have to give us more money so that we can build larger buildings. This overcrowding and abandonment just got worse as the 20th century proceeded.
This picture was taken around the late 1940s in the back ward of Rome Asylum. Notice the uniforms, the little sacks worn by inmates. These were made by the higher functioning inmates for the lower functioning inmates to wear.
Like many institutions, Rome at its height had more than 8,000 residents, with beds lined up end to end in the long halls as shown here. The women and men were still kept separate. Often the higher functioning inmates, known as working girls and working boys, worked for free, often as punishment.
as caretakers or attendants for the lower functioning inmates in these back wards here you see the working boys standing in the background this abandonment continued even after death this is actually a tombstone with a simple number on it instead of a name so this was inmate number two twenty but of course you had to follow the social conventions of respectability so even here In this cemetery with no names anywhere to be found on the tombstones, you had the inmates separated into sections for the Catholic numbers, and the Protestant numbers, and the Jewish numbers. This theme of abandonment and moral failure reached its absolute extreme in the 20th century in Nazi Germany. The Nazis picked up on themes from the eugenics scare created by English and American doctors and institution superintendents like Goddard.
We've all heard about the Holocaust and the killing of six million Jews, and some of us have also heard about the additional populations of Romanian gypsies and other groups that were killed. What's less commonly known is that one of the earliest populations that the Nazis set out to destroy was their disabled population. Nazi Germany killed between 70,000 and 100,000 children and adults with mental and physical disabilities, most of them with mental disabilities.
Some who managed to live. were subjected to hideous Nazi experiments that we associate with people like Joseph Mengele and others. This table gives the total number of people with disabilities killed between 1939 and 1941 in Nazi Germany. Perhaps the most infamous place was Hadamar, where over 10,000 people were killed between January and August of 1941. It was a very efficient operation. This is a picture of Hadamar Hospital.
in 1945. After being gassed to death, the bodies were cremated. This is a striking photo taken in 1941 of the smoke rising from the chimneys of the crematorium at Hadamar. A quotation from the Nuremberg trials talked about how the corpses were transferred on a conveyor belt to an incineration chamber.
The thick smoke from the incinerator was said to be visible every day over the city of Hadamar. But of course, the time of the cremation was not yet come. The townspeople and the staff who lived in the town never said a word.