‘Making lovely nonsense out of everything’: individuated receptions of eugenic theories of cognitive disability

Abstract

This project examines the rhetorical strategies that parents of children with cognitive disabilities use in appeals to medical authority. A close reading of four sets of letters from the Henry Herbert Goddard Papers reveals that parents were often sophisticated rhetorical agents who internalized, critiqued, and reappropriated eugenic theories and ideas. This archival project explores sites of eugenic thought’s reception, which are often overshadowed by scholarly attention to sites of production and dissemination. In an effort to increase attention to sites of reception, I outline a framework that invites future research to consider how recipients of theories of cognitive disability position themselves within professional networks of expertise in order to make claims from what might appear to be a subordinate position.

Keywords:

• Cognitive disability
• eugenics
• letter writing
• rhetoric
• Henry Goddard

Notes

1. All names, except Goddard’s, have been replaced by pseudonyms.

2. Distinguishing between the production and reception of rhetoric motivates Amy Rebok Rosenthal’s study of children and family experiences of nineteenth-century British Insane asylums: ‘Important as the care/control rhetoric was, and necessary as it is to understand how this interacted with a wider set of concerns about children and childhood, it is also vital to examine the lived experiences of insane children/youths and their families’ (2012, 37).

3. Anne Borsay and Pamela Dale (2012) argue that contemporary parent-led efforts to reform policy rely on polarized stereotypes of the parents of earlier generations. Borsay and Dale contend that these stereotypes restrict ‘an understanding of either past experiences or historic opportunities for participation, negotiation, and resistance’ (2012, 6).

4. Claire M. Roche (2003) briefly discusses a series of letters to Margaret Sanger published in Birth Control Review. These letters, authored by the general public, merely reflect Sanger’s eugenic ideas. Roche writes: ‘while it seems to me that the letters speak for themselves, I think it is important to point out that the letters, read with or against the rhetoric of the “professional” contributors, highlight… the nature of representations of the working class that go without interrogation of any kind’ (2003, 265). In allowing the letters to mostly speak for themselves, Roche’s article does explore the subtle rhetorical strategies that might subvert stereotypical representations of the working class.

5. Stuckey (2011) writes, ‘My main conclusion to this historiography dilemma of trying to open silences is that while there is such a thing as history waiting to be told, there is also such a thing as a history that is really hard to tell.’ Borsay and Dale (2012, 6) note that even within most promising, newly discovered source material, ‘multiple and discordant voices have often emerged … leaving partial, fragmentary and confused accounts.’

6. Goddard’s printed work exemplified these pressures. In ‘“Feebleminded” White Women and the Spectre of Proliferating Perversity in American Eugenics Narratives,’ Elizabeth Yukins (2003, 180) observes: ‘Goddard makes the identity of the mother a determining factor in the familial split’ between normalcy and cognitive disability.

7. Doctors, Zenderland (2001, 79) notes, would ‘watch for a swinging walk, “automatically busy,” hands, saliva dripping from a “meaningless mouth,” a “lustrous and empty” look, and limited or “repetitive” speech.’

8. ‘Ijjit’ and other derivatives like ‘idjit’ were used in literary and popular works of the period. In Rudyard Kipling’s (1893, 128) poem ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’, the narrator, a sailor, notes: ‘In port (we used no cargo steam) I’d daunder down the streets –/ An ijjit grinnin’ in a dream – for shells an’ parrakeets, [sic]/ An’ walkin’ – sticks o’ carved bamboo an’ blowfish stuffed an’ dried.’ Kipling’s narrator experiences a liberation connected to his ‘ijjit’-ness, which resembles Jones’s daughter’s playful freedom.

9. In rhetorical terms, Jones uses litotes to illustrate her daughter’s identity (Lanham 1991, 95). In litotes, a speaker ‘express[es] a thought by denying its contrary’ (Joseph as quoted in Lanham 1991, 96).

10. Jones’s representation of her daughter’s experience highlights the benefit of the large corpus of parent letters, a corpus that works around medical obfuscation. Monk and Manning (2012, 85–86) note that ‘the historian seeking to know something of patient experience must approach it through the observation of others. The nature of such mediated sources, in which the words and actions of the inmates are decontextualized or interpreted according to the observer’s assumptions about learning disabilities … certainly limits what we can know of patient experience.’ Smith’s daughter’s voice is still difficult to recover, but told through the voice of a sympathetic parent, it emerges as a counterpoint to medical representation.

11. Readers of Jay Dolmage’s Disability Rhetoric (2014b) will no doubt recognize this and other recurrent tropes and myths of disability throughout this and other letters to Goddard.