Where are the Disabled in the History of Education? The Impact of Polio on Sites of Learning

Abstract

Viewing disabled people as historical actors, this essay ponders emerging disability historiography, distilling three key characteristics—the norm, prejudice and human agency—and applies them to specific cases related to the polio phenomenon of the twentieth century, focusing on the closely related experiences of childhood, families and schooling.

Acknowledgements

I thank Bruce C. Nelson and Laurie Moses Hines for reading earlier drafts of this article and offering their usual incisive comments and stylistic suggestions. They are in no way responsible for any errors or intellectual missteps. I also thank the following hardworking archivists for their assistance in obtaining the images included in this essay: David Rose, at the March of Dimes; Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of the Berg Collection, New York City Public Library; and the good folks at Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc. Finally, I appreciate the insightful comments provided by the two anonymous reviewers for the History of Education. Their recommendations greatly strengthened this piece. This essay represents a revised and expanded version of a keynote speech I gave at the 2005 annual meeting of the British History of Education Society at the University of Birmingham. It is part of a larger project analyzing the impact of polio on American children and the public school system.

Notes

¹ Semantic debates exist over terminology. First, in this study, I use the label ‘polio’ (and the plural, ‘polios’) because polio literature prefers this terminology; it is not a derisive term. See, for example, Gould, Tony. A Summer Plague: Polo and Its Survivors. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995: 43, and Seavey, Nina Gilden, Jane S. Smith, and Paul Wagner. A Paralyzing Fear: The Triumph Over Polio in America. New York: TV Books, 1998: 10. Second, disability literature generally relies on ‘disabled people’ as a universal descriptive term, avoiding the negative connotations of ‘handicapped’, ‘crippled’, etc. However, in this analysis, some cited authors still used these latter labels. I have retained those original terms. For a thorough discussion of the meanings assigned to such phrases, see Barnartt, Sharon, and Richard Scotch. Disability Protests: Contentious Politics, 1970–1999. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2001: xxiii–xxv; Pointon, Ann, and ChrisDavies, eds. Framed: Interrogating Disability in the Media. London: British Film Institute, 1997: 2–3; Thomson, Rosemary Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997: 5–18.

David M. Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005: 8, addresses the etymology of the term ‘polio’ when, following the Second World War, newspapers shortened poliomyelitis to save valuable space.

² Longmore Paul K., and Lauri Umansky, eds. The New Disability History: American Perspectives. New York: New York University Press, 2001: 7, 8. According to Wilson, Daniel J. “A Crippling Fear: Experiencing Polio in the Era of FDR.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72 (1998): 467, historians have virtually ignored ‘illness narratives’ or ‘pathographies’, creating a one‐dimensional picture of diseases, a clinical, or institutional, perspective rather human experience, with its physical pain and emotional distress. On p. 494, he correctly notes this historiographical lacuna, albeit more widespread than he acknowledges: ‘In focusing on the larger developments in the history of poliomyelitis, historians have largely overlooked the daily struggles of those struck down by the virus.’

³ Examples include Copeland, Ian. “Special Educational Needs.” In A Century of Education, edited by Richard Aldrich. London: Routledge/Falmer: 2002: 165–84; Freeberg, Ernest. “’More Important Than a Rabble of Common Kings:’ Dr. Howe’s Education of Laura Bridgeman.” History of Education Quarterly 34 (Fall 1994): 305–27; Winzer, Margaret A. The History of Special Education: From Isolation to Integration. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1993.

⁴ Porter, Roy. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity. New York: Norton, 1997; Rosenberg, Charles E., and Janet Golden, eds. Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992; Longmore and Umansky, eds, The New Disability History, 8, 12–13, 15; the first set of quoted words appears on p. 8 and the second group of phrases is on p. 13. Also, see Kudlick, Catherine J. “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other.’” American Historical Review (June 2003) available at http://www.historycooperative.org?journals/ahr/108.3/kudlick.html (accessed 29 April 2004): and Baynton, Douglas C. “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History.” In Longmore and Umansky, eds, The New Disability History, who, on page 5, asserts: ‘Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it, but conspicuously absent in the histories we write. When historians do take note of disability, they usually treat it merely as personal tragedy or an insult to be deplored and a label to be denied, rather than as a cultural construct to be questioned and explored.’

⁵ Longmore, Paul K., and David Goldberger. “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the New Disability History.”, Journal of American History 87 (December 2000): 809.

⁶ Barnartt and Scotch, Disability Protests, 34–35. A few sentences in this paragraph originally appeared in Altenbaugh, Richard J. “Polio, Disability, and American Public Schooling: A Historiographical Exploration.” Educational Research and Perspectives 31 (December 2004): 139. Refer to Daniel J. Wilson’s fine summary of the polio rehabilitation experience on pp. 70–78 in Living with Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005.

⁷ Kudlick, “Disability History” (29 April 2004).––(Kudlick, paragraph #2; p. 1); (Kudlick, paragraph #3; p. 3); (Kudlick, paragraph #15; p. 6); (Kudlick, paragraph #22; p. 8). See also Altenbaugh, “Polio, Disability, and American Public Schooling”, 139–40.

⁸ These three quotes are from Barnartt and Scotch, Disability Protests, xxiii.

⁹ Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History”, 33–34, 37–50.

¹⁰ Barnartt and Scotch, Disability Protests, xviii–xix.

¹¹ Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 6, 13–14, 22–23. Refer as well to Altenbaugh, “Polio, Disability, and American Public Schooling”, 140.

¹² Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History”, 35, 36. For background on social Darwinism, see Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955: 4, 57–60, 161–169, 170–200.

¹³ Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 5, 6, 9–10, 11, 136.

¹⁴ Barnartt and Scotch, Disability Protests, 45, 46.

¹⁵ Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 46,

¹⁶ Barnartt and Scotch, Disability Protests, 46.

¹⁷ John S. Brown, ed. Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995: 392.

¹⁸ An earlier version of this paragraph appeared in Altenbaugh, “Polio, Disability, and American Public Schooling”, 137. Refer especially to Emerson, Haven. The Epidemic of Poliomyelitis in New York City in 1916 (1917; reprint, New York: Arno, 1977); Kiple, Kenneth F., ed. The Cambridge World History of Human Disease. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999: 942–50; Mee, Charles L. A Nearly Normal Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999: 5, 51–52; Seavey, Smith, and Wagner, A Paralyzing Fear.

¹⁹ Davis, Fred. Passage through Crisis: Polio Victims and their Families. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs‐Merrill, 1963: 138. The age cohort described in the previous paragraph is on p. 5.

²⁰ Quoted in Norden, Martin F. The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994: 12.

²¹ Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 25, 27, 50.

²² Norden, Cinema of Isolation, 3.

²³ Longmore and Goldberger, “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression”, 893. I chose the movie industry in this context because its rise during the first half of the twentieth century coincided with the American polio epidemic.

²⁴ Norden, Cinema of Isolation, 52–53, 54.

²⁵ Longmore and Goldberger, “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression”, 895–896.

²⁶ Norden, Cinema of Isolation, 115–20, 123, 133.

²⁷ Longmore and Goldberger, “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression”, 896, emphasis in the original. Refer also to Thomson, Rosemary Garland. “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” In The New Disability History, 335–74.

²⁸ Liachowitz, Claire H. Disability as a Social Construct: Legislative Roots. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988: 41, 45, 58, 61, 83.

²⁹ Longmore and Goldberger, “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression”, 893–94.

³⁰ Liachowitz, Disability as a Social Construct. The quotes can be found on pp. 13, 14, 99–100. See as well pp. 4, 15. For additional context, refer to Osgood, Robert L. For ‘Children Who Vary from the Normal Type:’ Special Education in Boston, 1838–1930. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2000 and Tropea, Joseph L. “Bureaucratic Order and Special Children: Urban Schools, 1890s–1940s.” History of Education Quarterly 27 (Spring 1987): 29–53.

³¹ Solenberger, Edith Reeves. Public School Classes for Crippled Children. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 10. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918. The quotes appear on pp. 8, 11, 25, 27. Also refer to pp. 10, 12, 13, 22, 26, 30–33, 39, 41.

³² Liachowitz, Disability as a Social Construct, 103.

³³ Longmore and Goldberger, “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression”, 893–894.

³⁴ Sass, Edmund J. with George Gottfried and Anthony Sorem. Polio’s Legacy: An Oral History. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996: xv. This study not only thematically analyzes the impact of polio on peoples’ lives but provides 35 oral histories to personally illustrate the various topics.

³⁵ Longmore and Umansky, The New Disability History, 7. See Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: New Press, 1995: 9–12, for another, seldom seen, side of Keller. For general historical background about the emergence of ‘special education’ refer to Altenbaugh, Richard J. The American People and Their Education: A Social History. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice‐Hall, 2003: as well as Winzer, The History of Special Education.

³⁶ Longmore and Umansky, The New Disability History, 8.

³⁷ Rogers, Naomi. Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996: 166, 168, 169.

³⁸ Gallagher, Hugh Gregory. FDR’s Splendid Deception: The Moving Story of Roosevelt’s Massive Disability—and the Intense Efforts to Conceal It from the Public. Arlington, VA: Vandamere Press, 1999. The quote is on p. 101; also see p. 161. Gallagher provides a superb analysis of Roosevelt’s complex character, how he reconciled the personal reality of polio (i.e. vulnerability) with his public image (i.e. a strong and robust leader). Refer as well to the following by Longmore and Goldberger, “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression”, 897: Roosevelt achieved ‘socially valid identity’ less through rigorous physical therapy and more through ‘denying and hiding the disabled parts of himself…’.

³⁹ Longmore and Goldberger, “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression”, 888, 891, 892, 897, 900, 901, 902, 905, 906, 907–908, 916, 917, 919. The terms ‘handicapped’ not ‘cripples’, “paralytics’, “invalids’, “paralytic victims’ or ‘helpless crippled people’, are quoted on p. 904. Semantics played a significant role since it contributed to social reality. Barnartt and Scotch, Disability Studies, 13, also allude to this episode.

⁴⁰ Ariés, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick. New York: Vintage Books, 1962; Breines, Wini. Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992; Hawes, Joseph M. Children in Urban Society: Juvenile Delinquency in Nineteenth‐Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971; Hawes, Joseph M. The Children’s Rights Movement: A History of Advocacy and Protection. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991; Hiner, N. Ray, and Joseph M. Hawes, eds. Growing Up in America: Children in Historical Perspective. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985; King, Wilma. Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth‐Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995; Nasaw, David. Children of the City: At Work and At Play. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985; Palladino, Grace. Teenagers: An American History. New York: Basic Books, 1996; West, Elliott. Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989); Werner, Emmy E. Pioneer Children on the Journey West. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995.

⁴¹ Freeberg, “’More Important Than a Rabble of Common Kings’”; Axtell, James. The SchoolUpon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971: 73–74; Lederer, Susan E. Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

⁴² The quote appears on p. 52 in Davis, Passage through Crisis. Refer as well to Wilson, Living with Polio, 39–50.

⁴³ Seavey, Smith, and Wagner, A Paralyzing Fear, 77–78, 126; Boyer is quoted on p. 77. See, as well, Davis, Passage through Crisis, 69.

⁴⁴ These three paragraphs draw on data from and analyses by Davis, Passage through Crisis, 69, 70, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78–79; the mother is quoted on pp. 73 and 77. Also see Mee, A Nearly Normal Life, 36. Several clinical studies appeared before Davis’s research that corroborated many of his findings. Refer to Copellman, Fay S. “Follow‐up of One Hundred Children with Poliomyelitis.” The Family 25 (December 1944): 289–97; Coughlin, Ellen Whelan. “Parental Attitudes Toward Handicapped Children.” Child 6 (1941): 41–45; and Lowman, Charles L., and Morton A. Seidenfeld. “A Preliminary Report of the Psychosocial Effects of Poliomyelitis.” Journal of Consulting Psychology 11 (1947): 30–37. Wilson, Daniel J. Living with Polio: The Epidemic and Its Survivors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, uses the phrase ‘polio community’ on p. 101.

⁴⁵ Sass, Polio’s Legacy, 80, 128–29, 145. Schwartz is quoted on p. 147 and Rogers on pp. 56–57.

⁴⁶ Altenbaugh, The American People and Their Education; Axtell, The School Upon a Hill, op. cit.; McNeil, William H. Plagues and Peoples. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1976: 186; Werner, Pioneer Children, 123–27; Nasaw, Children of the City; Zelizar, Viviana A. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books, 1985).

⁴⁷ Gallagher, FDR’s Splendid Deception, 29. Wilson, Living with Polio, provides a comprehensive treatment of the family environment in chapter 6.

⁴⁸ Wilson, “A Crippling Fear”, 466, 483–84, 485; the last quote in this paragraph is on p. 484. For information about Warm Springs and the NFIP see Gallagher, FDR’s Splendid Deception, and Rose, David W. Images of America: March of Dimes. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2003.

⁴⁹ The quotes and information in these three paragraphs can be found in Davis, Passage through Crisis, 83, 84, 85, 86–87, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 97. Davis, on pp. 96 and 97, provides wonderful insight into the struggle of one mother’s gradual emotional adjustment, which I tap here, by providing oral testimony at periods of two and six weeks, and four, eight and 15 months. Marvin’s mother is quoted in these paragraphs on pp. 96–97.

⁵⁰ Mee, Charles L. A Nearly Normal Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999: 105–08, 153–54. The home education experiences of Kay Brutger, David Kangas and Robert Gurnery can be found in Sass, Polio’s Legacy, 27, 63, 74. Also see Marilynne Rogers, 59. Finally, Wilson, Living with Polio, provides a thorough description of the various family responses to the polio’s homecoming.

⁵¹ As examples, see Cunningham, Peter, and Philip Gardner. Becoming Teachers: Texts and Testimonies, 1907–1950. London: Woburn Press, 2004; Grosvenor, Ian, Martin Lawn, and Kate Rousmaniere, eds. Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom. New York: Peter Lang, 1999); Hussey, Stephen. “The School Air Raid Shelter: Rethinking Wartime Pedagogies.” History of Education Quarterly 43 (Winter 2003): 517–39.

⁵² Davis, Passage through Crisis, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 147, 151. ‘Normals’ is quoted on p. 140. Refer as well to Altenbaugh, “Polio, Disability, and American Public Schooling”, 147–50.

⁵³ Davis, Passage through Crisis, 93. See also Gallagher, FDR’s Splendid Deception, 29.

⁵⁴ Johnson’s oral history is in Sass, Polio’s Legacy, on p. 86. Johnson is also cited in Altenbaugh, “Polio, Disability, and American Public Schooling”, 146.

⁵⁵ The first quote by Richard Owen is in Sass, Polio’s Legacy, p. 33, and the second quote by him can be found in Seavey, Smith, and Wagner, A Paralyzing Fear, 241. See Bartnartt and Scotch, Disability Studies, and Sass, Polio’s Legacy, 53, for more information about polios’ school experiences.

⁵⁶ This quote from Arvid Schwartz can be found in Seavey, Smith, and Wagner, A Paralyzing Fear, 263. Refer to Davis, Passage through Crisis, 87, as well as Robert Gurney’s oral history in Sass, Polio’s Legacy, 27. See likewise Altenbaugh, “Polio, Disability, and American Public Schooling”, 146.

⁵⁷ Longmore and Umansky, The New Disability History, 7. Also see Longmore and Goldberger, “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression”, 921. For classic historiographical critiques, refer to Bailyn, Bernard. Education in the Forming of American Society. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960; Cremin, Lawrence A. The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley: An Essay on the Historiography of American Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 1965 and Traditions of American Education. New York: Basic Books, 1977.

⁵⁸ Barnartt and Scotch, Disability Studies, 14, 15.

⁵⁹ Seavey, Smith, and Wagner, A Paralyzing Fear, 234.

⁶⁰ Paul Darke, “Eye Witness”, in Framed: Interrogating Disability in the Media, edited byAnn Pointon and Chris Davies. London: British Film Institute, 1997: 13. Also refer to Norden, The Cinema of Isolation.