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“A DEAF VARIETY OF THE HUMAN RACE”: HISTORICAL MEMORY, ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL, AND EUGENICS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2014

Brian H. Greenwald  and
John Vickrey Van Cleve
Brian H. Greenwald*
Affiliation:
Gallaudet University
John Vickrey Van Cleve*
Affiliation:
Gallaudet University
*
email: [email protected].
email: [email protected].
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Abstract

Alexander Graham Bell stood at the intersection of two late nineteenth-century American social developments. First, a nascent deaf community, threaded by residential schools and the use of a shared visual language, began to form by the 1850s, drawing deaf people into regular interaction and intermarriage. Second, the American eugenics movement, determined to eliminate perceived social problems through reproductive restrictions, came to prominence as the century neared its end. Bell's role in publicly connecting these two historical threads has earned him the approbation of the American deaf community and historians of disability.

This article examines Bell's words and actions closely over thirty years to argue that a combination of Bell's own hubris and historians' tendency to conflate two aspects of his complex attitude toward disability has distorted historical memory. Bell feared that difference alone led to inequality, and he hoped that society could be improved through informed reproductive decisions. Ultimately, Bell found himself entangled in an alarming eugenic environment and sought to thwart eugenicists who would interfere with deaf reproductive rights.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 28 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2015 

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References

NOTES

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16 We use the schools' modern names. For a recent summary of the science surrounding genetics and hearing loss, see Dagan, Orit and Avraham, Karen B., “The Complexity of Hearing Loss from a Genetics Perspective” in Van Cleve, John Vickrey, ed., Genetics, Disability, and Deafness (Washington, DC, 2004)Google Scholar, 93. Mitchell noted that “six of the seven names given by Bell as occurring most frequently [at the Illinois School] were also included in the 1939 list by the Social Security Board of the ten most common surnames in the United States.” Mitchell, “Haunting Influence,” 351. Bell, Memoir, 6. Bell studied the surnames of 2,106 students at the American School between 1817 and 1877 and 1,620 at the Illinois School between 1846 and 1882.

17 Bell, Memoir, 5.

18 Bell, Memoir, 11, 13, 23. Residential schools for deaf children in the nineteenth century typically noted on pupil records whether any relatives were reported as being deaf.

19 Bell, Memoir, 27. Italics in original.

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88 Charles B. Davenport [hereafter Davenport] to AGB, Mar. 7, 1904, Mss.B.D27, Box 4, Folder 1, Charles Benedict Davenport Papers, American Philosophical Society, [hereafter CBDP].

89 AGB to Davenport, Mar. 17, 1904, Folder 1, CBDP.

90 Davenport to AGB, Mar. 18, 1904, Folder 1, CBDP.

91 AGB to Davenport, July 11, 1906, Folder 2, CBDP.

92 Bell, “The Deaf,” 132, 125.

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101 First published in Bell, “A Few Thoughts,” 119–123.

102 Bell, “A Few Thoughts,” 122.

103 Quoted in Carlson, The Unfit, 194.

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118 AGB to Edward Allen Fay [hereafter EAF], Dec. 13, 1909. E. A. Fay—Letters, Bell, Alexander Graham, Box 1, Folder 30, 1909, Gallaudet University Archives [hereafter GUA].

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