‘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

Points of interest

•	This article illustrates how lay recipients of eugenic thought, namely the parents of children with cognitive disability, deferentially argue with figures of medical authority, specifically Henry H. Goddard.
•	The article reminds all readers that parents are and have been savvy rhetorical agents, even in the darkest era of disability history.
•	At first glance, many parents seem to endorse eugenic thought. However, this article explores several correspondences that invalidate this impression.
•	Parents control the terms of the discussion in subtle ways that allow them to advocate for their children. They ask questions that eugenic schemas tend to overlook and criticize the key terms and distinctions eugenic theories rely on.
•	The corpus for this research is the Henry Herbert Goddard Papers. This article invites lay readers to consider how these powerful rhetorical strategies reemerge in our contemporary era.

Introduction

Dr. Wynn tells my husband that he expects to join you in Chicago on the 20th: would you be willing and able to give me the fifteen minutes there between trains? I could absolutely suit your convenience in the matter of time and place. I can’t say how deeply I would appreciate the opportunity – I know I am asking a great deal: if I did not need your advice so urgently I should certainly not impose upon you. I comfort myself with the thought that it must be no new thing to be appealed to you in this way. (Jan S. Smith¹ to Henry Goddard, 12 July 1922)

In her request for a brief meeting regarding her son Chester’s schooling, Smith crafts a delicate, exceedingly well-mannered entreaty to a now notorious authority on cognitive disability, special education, and eugenics in the early twentieth century. In an earlier 1921 letter, Smith wrote to Henry H. Goddard, by then a prominent eugenicist and psychologist, thanking (and paying) him for a previous consultation about Chester’s unbalanced ‘nervous equilibrium.’ ‘When I consulted you a year ago,’ Smith recalls in this 1922 letter, ‘ … you were good enough to offer to help me with the problem he presented if in future, I should feel need of help.’ She continues, ‘I am going, boldly, to take you at your word.’ The boldness of Smith’s claim is mitigated by her affiliation with medical authority: she is the wife an Indianapolis electrotherapy specialist. Although her husband is a local expert in a medical field different from Goddard’s, the Smiths are nonetheless members of a professional medical network. The delicacy and self-deprecation inherent in her plea is part of a larger rhetorical sharpness that derives from and relies on her status as a medical insider. Presciently acknowledging that such appeals ‘must be no new thing’ for Goddard, Smith clues scholars in on an oft-overlooked system of private correspondence that operated in parallel with public eugenic discourse.

In 1922 Goddard was at the height of his national renown. Biographer Leila Zenderland (2001, 2) notes Goddard’s rapid rise as he popularized Binet intelligence tests: ‘By 1910, he had convinced American physicians to try intelligence testing. By 1911, he had used the same tests in public schools.’ Goddard soon extended eugenic psychology’s influence beyond medicine and education:

By 1913, he had tried out his tests at Ellis Island. By 1914, he had become the first psychologist to present evidence from Binet tests in a court of law. By 1918, he had even helped to introduce testing to the United States Army. (Zenderland 2001, 2)

Using these tests, Goddard sought to root out mental defectiveness that was concealed within a broad array of carriers: the idiot, the moron, the backward child. A charter member of ‘The Feebleminded Club,’ Goddard positioned mental defect as a point which psychologists and wealthy donors could rally around in order to influence public policy (Trent 1996, 157). His immensely popular book The Kallikak Family (Goddard 1912) professed to identify the genetic roots of feeblemindedness and offered ‘convincing proof of the devastating social consequence’ of cognitive disability (Zenderland 2001, 3).

Smith’s plea highlights an epistolary savviness that parents of children with cognitive disabilities needed when corresponding with such an iconic figure. Parents relied on polite supplication and illustrations of disciplinary affiliation to craft effective appeals that praised and critiqued Goddard. They persuaded him to value the questions they posed about cognitive disability and to work toward goals that they outlined. Most letters in the Henry Herbert Goddard Papers are not cold or terse, but spirited and polite. Even Goddard’s replies to parents who lack scientific expertise or institutional authority were interpreted by recipients as patient, considerate, and informative. Yet under this sheen of politeness, parents exerted significant rhetorical agency. A close reading of parent letters dispels the notion that parents operated at the poles of thoughtless internalization or steadfast resistance. Instead, parents pragmatically endorsed, reappropriated, and rejected eugenic theories of cognitive disability.

I. The production and reception of eugenic theories of cognitive disability

Goddard’s copious body of work has allowed scholars to consider not only how cognitive disability has been rhetorically constructed, but also how constructions of it were disseminated to a national audience. J. David Smith (1985) distinguishes Goddard’s The Kallikak Family from other eugenic texts by noting that the book’s concise, storybook form captivated the lay reader in ways that technical texts could not. ‘The Kallikaks gave human form to a story that the social Darwinists and eugenicists had been developing for decades. The public found in the book a parable they wanted to believe’ (Smith 1985, 9). Christina Cogdell (2004, 5; original emphasis) explains why the public found the Kallikak parable so persuasive: ‘eugenics became widely popular by adding onto a solid ideological base the allure of control: control over evolutionary progress, control over social problems plaguing middle and upper class whites, and even control over the future.’ Gerald O’Brien (2011) elaborates on this rhetoric, arguing that eugenicists relied on series of tropes, like the withering Kallikak family tree or the financially burdensome child, to make eugenic problems legible for the general public. Eugenic writing, he concludes, created a rhetorical environment in which the ‘feeble-minded’ became ‘faceless stereotypes, no more deserving of individual attention than any other denigrated minority group’ (O’Brien 2011). While O’Brien’s analysis helps scholars understand the rhetoric that eugenic writers produced and circulated, his conclusion depicts a readership as faceless as the feebleminded eugenic subject.²

Eugenic rhetoric circulated so easily because it was, in part, produced within institutions that functioned as centers of American political power and policing. In ‘Framing Disability, Developing Race: Photography as Eugenic Technology,’ Jay Dolmage (2014a) argues that bureaucratic texts, particularly visual texts, functioned as a ‘means of control’ that transformed immigrant subjects into ‘spectacles of rejection.’ At Ellis Island, government officials framed disability as freakery through means of photography. Disability overlapped with ethnicity, and administrative action ‘allowed for [a] “new racism” to be experimented with and perfected.’ In his conclusion, Dolmage turns away from national prejudice in order to attend to how these sweeping forces influence the perceptions and self-perceptions of the individual viewer. Dolmage (2014a) reflects that the most important phenomenon to study is ‘the existence of the image and its rhetorics in our own thoughts and actions. Thus, the final visual rhetoric of Ellis Island was this: training the glance upon yourself.’

I wish to examine here an important implication of Dolmage’s work: although scholars often consider internalization as functioning at the level of broad national consciousness or the abstract level of ‘the reader’ or ‘the viewer,’ this process also occurs in particular viewers and readers. Eugenic rhetoric was individuated, and, as I will show, particular individuations of popular theories of cognitive disability differ radically. Scholars often incidentally depict recipients of eugenic rhetoric as passive machines who internalize and reproduce dominant discourses of disability. This tendency is not intentional. Rather, it is a byproduct emerging from a critical focus on the development and dissemination of eugenic ideas. But what about their reception? A close reading of Goddard’s correspondence with parents illuminates the contours of an individuated reception process that produces responses ranging from unilateral internalization to conscious and even playful rejection.

In this vein, scholarship on eugenics can take a cue from recent studies on the history of parenting and cognitive disability. Allison Carey (2014) argues that parents, when interacting with medical authority, straddled a line between the acceptance and resistance of professional discourse. Carey notes that mid-twentieth-century parent memoirs depict parents who ‘negotiate with experts to access the benefits of professional expertise while trying to avoid potential negative outcomes such as usurpation of parental authority’ (2014, 58). Carey’s recasting of the parent as a negotiator overhauls traditional ways of conceptualizing parents of children with cognitive disabilities. She rejects ‘polarized depictions of parents as either vigilantes who challenge the system or collaborators who are complicit in a medical ableist system of normalization’ (2014, 58).³ Extending the range of the Carey’s ‘acceptance and resistance’ paradigm, we can see that the dynamics of negotiation change in the most private of contexts. The parent memoirs Carey surveys appeared in book format and were serialized in national periodicals. Pearl S. Buck, for example, was a famous literary author, and her memoir was excerpted in Reader’s Digest (Trent 1994, 233). The resistance inherent in the early-twentieth-century correspondences with Goddard is far subtler than the resistance Carey identifies in popular mid-twentieth-century memoirs. Yet in this earlier body of writing, parents still adopt a position of deferential resistance in order ‘to meet the needs of their disabled offspring in a context of limited options’ (Carey 2014, 63).

Previous close readings of parent/professional correspondences focus on letters written by experts.⁴ For example, Zosha Stuckey (2011) has analyzed a set of 23 letters written by asylum medical staff to the mother of James Thornton, an asylum resident. To recover the perspectives of both James and his mother, Stuckey adopts two methodological strategies: Jacqueline James Royster’s concept of ‘imaginative reconstruction’ and Vicki Tolar Collin’s concept of ‘rhetorical accretion.’ The former encourages scholars to ‘make visible the many features, factors, relationships, people, and practices that heretofore were not visible’ (as quoted in Stuckey 2011). The latter helps Stuckey uncover the voices of asylum residents and their families ‘through the institutional lens and layers (or accretion) of the institutional voices’ (2011; original emphasis). These methods allow Stuckey to recast the apparent silence of individuals with cognitive disabilities as a rhetorical act and effect. She writes that although ‘pupils may be silent in the extant historical record,’ they were ‘in no way … absent or entirely acquiescent.’ I contend that Stuckey’s work pushes scholars to reconsider the style, and thus visibility, of the ‘acceptance/resistance’ paradigm. Stuckey observes that ‘the correspondence between the asylum and the rest of the world was highly patrolled, ironically, in the most familiar, cordial, and seemingly friendly ways.’ A dominant ‘bureaucratic artifice’ projects a tone of goodwill and narrates a story of inmate progress. However, beneath this artifice lie the rhetorical strategies that institutions used to control residents and families.

In the sets of correspondence that I examine, parents project a tone of goodwill over rhetorical moves that subvert professional authority. A large section of the archive consists of letters to and from the general public, including letters to and from parents of children with disabilities and letters to and from a diverse array of public and private organizations: The American Rolling Mill Company in Middletown, Ohio; The Toledo Chamber of Commerce; and even the Office of the President at Western Reserve University. Consisting of thank-you notes and requests for receipts of speaker’s fees, organizational correspondence is too bland for even the most analytical of close readings. Yet the very dryness of this subcategory underlines the subversiveness of the seemingly obsequious parent letters.

Here there has been no need to imaginatively reconstruct parent voices. Eight parent-authored letters are found in the archive. Two letters are authored by women concerned with the potential of becoming a parent of a feebleminded child. Only three of Goddard’s replies are found. I examine three sets of parent correspondence with Goddard as well as one set of correspondence from a ‘potential’ parent. I have selected these letters to illustrate the range of the extent to which parents accept and resist institutional authority. For example, the first letter relays an unassuming request for Goddard’s services, and the last letter tells a story that defies medical prognosis. A current of deferential resistance runs underneath both letters. Disability studies historians have recognized that recovering the voices of individuals with cognitive disabilities and their families is immensely challenging, given the material scarcity of the texts they authored.⁵ Further, the material that parents have left behind offers far less obvious evidence of negotiation and resistance than published parent memoirs. Close reading functions as a methodological tool by which subtle arguments can be seen and parent voices heard.

In most exchanges, writers appeal to Goddard as a national source of scientific expertise who is not bound to a particular physical location. His letters were written on personal paper, devoid of any institutional letterhead. Just as the institution is obscured, so are the roles of parent and even child. Mrs T. H. Johnson inquires about the possibility of her giving birth to a feebleminded child. The binary between institution and parent frays at its seams. In contrast to other scholarship, I explore an interpersonal, private network of power rather than a tidy dialectical exchange between superior institution and subordinate individual. To explore this network, I ask the following questions:

1.	How is the act of appeal rendered in letter writing?
2.	What do appeals reveal about the ways in which letter writers receive, use, refute, and reappropriate dominate eugenic theories?
3.	What does letter writing reveal about how power and agency manifests in a broad network of relationships that exists outside institutional walls?

Asking these questions allows scholars to consider how individuals made sense and, as some letters reveal, nonsense out of dominant theories of disability during the eugenic era.

II. The deferential inquiry: Mrs L. M. Granderson

The first recorded appeal in the Henry Herbert Goddard Papers comes from Mrs L. M. Granderson. The letter lacks the signs of careful design and formality that later typewritten letters show. Composed three years before the publication The Kallikak Family, the handwritten letter is textually thin and seems hastily drafted. Granderson’s signature and closing are wedged in at the bottom of the second page. The letter reads:

Dear Doctor,

My sister, Miss V––, who is attending the course of lectures of the N.Y. Univ. which you are giving, has spoken to you about my little girl (5 yrs. old) who has been backward since birth, although we have seen a very marked improvement in the last six months. I would like to have you examine her and get your advice, if you will kindly let me know when and how to arrange to have you see her and also, please let me know what you would charge for an examination of this kindly. Hoping to hear from you, I am yours truly.

Mrs. L. M. Granderson

In such a concise request, Granderson’s argument can only emerge via close reading. In the first sentence, Granderson establishes the value of her appeal by naming her sister, a student in Goddard’s course. The description of her sister is actually the second of two appositives and the third of three noun phrases that compose the long subject of Granderson’s opening remark. To establish a connection with Goddard, Granderson emphasizes key relationships. ‘My sister’ denotes, obviously, the closest of interpersonal and biological relationships. ‘Miss V–– ’ denotes a more formal, but still close, relationship between teacher and pupil. Granderson knows that Goddard will recognize the name given her sister’s attendance in his class and the fact that Miss V–– has communicated with Goddard personally about the issue. Within the first set of appositive noun phrases, Granderson establishes her ethos and the merit of her request by positioning her sister as a proxy supplicant. If the grammatical subject of Granderson’s opening sentence was limited to ‘My sister, Miss V––,’ her appeal would not as effectively illustrate her worth as an appealer. The non-restrictive relative noun clause, ‘who is attending the course of lectures of the N.Y. Univ. which you are giving,’ establishes Granderson as participant – by proxy of her sister – in the leading efforts to uncover eugenic truth.

Writing in 1909, Granderson catches Goddard at the beginning of his rise to national importance. Fourteen months earlier, Thomas M. Balliet, Dean of New York University’s School of Pedagogy, had written to Goddard regarding a new section of a course ‘Education of Defectives.’ ‘We had thought of giving it only every other year, but the attendance this year has been so encouraging that we are thinking of giving it next year.’ Although Granderson would not have known of Balliet’s letter, she nonetheless reminds Goddard that she and her sister contribute to the momentum of his institutional cache and scientific influence. More importantly, her appeal functions as a reminder that ‘backwardness’ affects even the best students of scientific progress. She frames intellectual ‘defect’ in a direct, interpersonal lineage in which Goddard now finds himself: he teaches a course in which a sister of a mother of a backward child sits. Defectiveness is rhetorically moved closer to the man who studies it.

The predicate of the first sentence establishes the worth of the person for which the appeal is made. The noun phrase that signifies this person, ‘my little girl,’ is continually modified to develop her merit as a potential patient. Emotional and informational evidence emphasizes her status as a child. The diminutive ‘little’ is personal; the parenthetical information ‘5 yrs. old’ is the type of raw data one might see in a medical report. Granderson provides her own medical-esque report of her daughter’s condition, noting the presence of backwardness since birth and the very ‘marked improvement’ she has made. She makes the case that her child shows promise for improvement and is thus worthy of the busy doctor’s attention. Granderson closes her letter with a long second sentence that is exceptionally polite. The request is couched within modal verbs (e.g. ‘I would like to’), and she frames Goddard’s possible action in the subjunctive ‘if you will kindly let me know.’ A subtle shift in case occurs in the final independent clause ‘Please let me know what you would charge for an examination of this kindly.’ This imperative sentence still adheres to a delicacy of tone, and the command ultimately pertains to a command Goddard is soon to give, the declaration of the amount to be paid. The emphasis on politeness and delicacy is revealed most by the crossed out ‘ly’ suffix on the final word. This poignant error magnifies Granderson’s goal for ‘kindly’ correspondence.

No replies from Goddard have survived, nor have any follow-up letters from Granderson. Still, even as an isolated appeal, this 133-word letter reminds scholars to peel back layers of rhetorical accretion and, above all, read language closely in order to fully explore the rhetorical agency and perspective of those who appealed to Goddard. While this analysis does not need to recover Granderson’s voice through the language of the institution, scholars can nonetheless see her engage institutional practices and structures. Granderson strategically adopts the discursive norms of the institutional networks of power she recalls in order to craft an appeal that will be most likely, in her view, to benefit her child. In the remaining three letters, parents participate in these frameworks, and some writers undermine them. The three remaining sets of correspondence – authored by Mrs T. H. Johnson, F. B. Bleakmore, and Sarah Jones – offer more textually rich appeals that amplify the often silenced voices of the parents of children with cognitive disabilities.

III. The studious question: Mrs T. H. Johnson

On 16 March 1927, Mrs T. H. Johnson wrote to Goddard:

I have just finished reading your books, ‘The Kallikak Family’ and ‘Feeblemindedness; Its Causes and Consequences,’ and although the information to be gained by a perusal of these works is very valuable, I did not find an answer to the question that is perplexing me and am appealing to you for a direct reply.

At the beginning of the next paragraph, Johnson reveals: ‘What I want to know is whether you think there is any possibility of a child of mine being feeble-minded or a moron.’ Johnson presents a problem of knowledge, a problem that fundamentally differs from Granderson’s conundrum of real-life, embodied ‘backwardness.’ Unlike Granderson, Johnson does not begin by citing one of Goddard’s pupils; rather, she cites his informational products – his then famous studies of heredity and feeblemindedness. The language Johnson uses, the ‘valuable information,’ the ‘perplexing question,’ and the ‘direct reply,’ mimic a positivist and scientific epistemic.

Johnson’s rhetoric reveals ways of thinking inculcated by eugenic education initiatives. Marouf A. Hasian (1996, 38) writes, ‘For youngsters growing up in the 1910s and 1920s, the air was filled with the voices of eugenicists beckoning them to remember the eugenics creed.’ Johnson responds to familiar eugenic exigencies presented to young people. Hasian quotes a passage from a textbook which exemplifies these pressures:

Even though you are in high school, it’s only fair to yourselves that you should remember the responsibility that marriage brings. You should be parents. Will you choose to have children well-born? Or will you send them into the world with an inheritance that will handicap them for life? (1996, 38)

Hasian argues that ‘For the audiences reading this and similar passages, the messages were fairly clear: in order to be a normal adult, one needed to live eugenically’ (1996, 37).⁶ In her opening, Johnson frames her appeal as responding to this call that has been put forth. She establishes herself as a well-read student of Goddard’s work, eager to apply scientific truths to her own responsibility as a mother-to-be.

After Johnson frames her dilemma, she creates a family history for her potential child that strongly resembles eugenic family studies. Like any good eugenicist, she examines the intelligence of herself and her husband: ‘My husband and I are both normal and intelligent; in fact, as far as I, myself, am concerned, I think I can say that I am above the average’ (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers). She provides evidence for her claim, noting that she graduated with honors from both grammar and high school, and she earned ‘the highest mark for the four years in stenographic work of all the pupils in the whole school.’ Her description of herself, in contrast to the terse description of her husband, builds the ethos of an appeal that derives from her identity as a good student. Aware that Goddard might read her description as haughty (like many present-day readers do), she explains: ‘I say this with no vanity but simply to prove to you that my mentality is a little above normal.’ Thus, Johnson adheres to a rhetoric of knowing, a rhetoric of proof that runs throughout her appeal to Goddard to help solve a hereditary problem.

As Johnson continues, her narrative begins to resemble family histories even more: ‘Here lies the difficulty … my husband’s people come from Denmark, of the lower middle class farmers’ (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers). Johnson then classifies mothers, fathers, and children as normal or abnormal. Her classification system mirrors the classification systems seen in Goddard’s eugenic charts, where ‘normalness’ is signaled by white boxes, and feeblemindedness by black boxes. Her husband’s mother and father are ‘honest,’ ‘industrious,’ and above all ‘normal.’ Her husband’s four older brothers are ‘all right mentally.’ Problems arise with her husband’s younger sister, who ‘did not learn to talk until she was five years old.’ Her slow development persisted in school, and by the age of 17 she ‘had only reached the fourth grade.’ Her parents’ attempt to send her to business school to learn stenography (in which Johnson herself is an expert) proves futile. It results in ‘the head of the school inform[ing] her parents it was useless for them to send her any longer.’ Despite these challenges, Johnson notes that her sister-in-law is currently ‘self-supporting’ and ‘is now working in Flimpton’s, a printing shop, feeding presses, and is earning around $17 a week.’ While her deficiencies are made obvious to Goddard, they are masked to the everyday observer. Johnson notes:

She can read and write and carry on a conversation after a fashion, but she does not say much unless directly spoken to. She looks intelligent, makes a nice appearance, is fairly good looking, but there is certainly something abnormal about her. (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers)

Johnson’s narrative of her sister in-law actually derives largely from Goddard’s narrative of Deborah Kallikak. At the close of the introductory chapter of The Kallikak Family, Goddard (1912, 12) writes: ‘rather good-looking, bright in appearance, with many attractive ways, the teacher clings to the hope, indeed insists, that such a girl will come out all right. Our work with Deborah convinces us that such hopes are delusions.’ Johnson’s sister-in-law follows the same pattern of slow academic development as Deborah. Despite these limitations, she, like Deborah, masters particular vocational tasks. Johnson’s sister-in-law learns printing techniques and develops social abilities that allow her to live independently despite her status as a ‘moron.’ In The Kallikak Family, Deborah’s needlework, waitressing, and other domestic abilities give the illusion, according to Goddard, that she might be fit for society. Yet Johnson, through her description of her sister-in-law, acknowledges that such fitness is illusory. For those attuned to eugenic ways of seeing and knowing, abnormality cannot be effaced.

Cognitive abnormality becomes more pronounced as Johnson continues her familial survey. Her husband’s youngest brother is not a moron who can blend into society, but a feebleminded man whose deficiencies are obvious even to the untrained eye. By narrating her in-laws as moron and idiot, Johnson reveals her felicity to the eugenic paradigms that Goddard produced. Her husband’s younger brother, she observes, cannot read or write even after his stint in a school for the feebleminded. Bodily abnormality magnifies mental deficiency: ‘He is big and husky and eats enough for two people … He stands in a stoop-shouldered manner and walks with a queer shuffle from side to side with his hands hanging loosely in front of him’⁷ (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers). Johnson ultimately frames her brother-in-law’s feeblemindedness morally: ‘the boy is sullen and disobedient and does not want to do one stroke of work about the time and the place.’ In her appeal to Goddard, Johnson proves her knowledge by fashioning two dominant tropes in eugenic discourse: the moron who blends in with society; and the lethargic, stoop-shouldered idiot who cannot be missed.

Most of Johnson’s attention is devoted to her brother-in-law and sister-in-law. In the remainder of her family history, she mentions her father-in-law’s ‘brother in Denmark … had two deaf and dumb children.’ In addition, her mother-in-law’s brother had a child ‘with a split palette,’ who ‘was almost totally deaf.’ After she finishes her history, she asks: ‘now, as long as my people were all intelligent, bright persons, and my husband himself is normal, do you think there is any likelihood of my giving birth to a feebleminded child?’ Her inquiry at this point continues to be framed as scientific question of hereditary. As she closes her letter, she adopts an emotional bent:

I know I have no right to presume on your good nature, but I am so worried about this whole matter and any information or advice you see fit to give me, I can assure you, will be deeply appreciated.’ (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers)

To effectively appeal to eugenic authority, Johnson begins by signifying the extent to which she is well-versed in eugenic thought, and she ends by declaring the anxiety she faces as a mother who aspires to live eugenically.

Goddard’s response would have come as a surprise and a relief to Johnson. He writes: ‘About all we know enough to say is that feebleminded people should not become parents. When it comes to the brothers and sisters of feebleminded parents, our ignorance is too great to warrant putting any restrictions on parenthood’ (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers). In spite of the impressions that accessible books like The Kallikak Family might give, Goddard reframes scientific knowledge and practice as less stable and less conclusive. This disciplinary self-abnegation does not preclude Goddard from seeing himself as a source of instruction and aid. He provides a classroom lecture in miniature:

If he [Johnson’s husband] is duplex normal, you could not have a feebleminded child even if you were feebleminded yourself. If your husband is simplex normal, you cannot have a feebleminded child unless you also are simplex, but you say that there is no defect known in your ancestry. (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers)

Goddard concludes that ‘on the whole, I do not feel that you are running any great risk in having children.’ Goddard solves the hereditary dilemma by correcting his pupil’s understanding of scientific discourse and assuaging the anxiety that eugenic initiatives have instilled – all while preserving his expert authority.

IV. Pressing requests and subversive reports: F. B. Bleakmore and Sarah Jones

Early twentieth-century interactions with cognitive disability extended beyond questions of the genetic possibility of ‘feebleminded’ children. On 25 August 1928, F. B. Bleakmore wrote to Goddard: ‘My wife has just reached home and conveyed the information to me that you gave her today about our mentally defective child of the Mongolian [sic] type’ (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers). Like Johnson, Bleakmore operates within a framework of scientific knowledge, citing ‘information’ that is passed from Goddard to his wife and then to him. Although Bleakmore mistakes ‘Mongolian’ for ‘Mongoloid,’ the early-twentieth-century label for Down syndrome, the information ‘conveyed’ is classificatory in nature and adheres to the taxonomy of the time period. Bleakmore reveals his admiration and awe for Goddard’s eugenic way of uncovering knowledge: ‘I had never dreamed that such definite information in the matter could be so positively set forth.’ Bleakmore’s statement represents an extreme valuation of eugenic claims to truth. To present-day readers, his superlative claim almost reads as a caricature of popular views of positivist science.

As the letter continues, Bleakmore’s praise for the utility and accuracy of professional diagnosis is replaced by claims and questions which illustrate that his understanding of his son’s ‘defect’ is less certain than he initially lets on. In the next sentence, he writes: ‘Had I had any idea of this I would have accompanied her [his wife] in order to help her sustain the shock and obtain data and advice from you that she did not think of’ (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers). Like Johnson, Bleakmore acknowledges the eugenically endowed responsibility he assumes as a parent of a child with a mental ‘defect.’ He alludes that his wife failed, if only because of shock, to ask key questions about vital information regarding their child. Bleakmore misogynistic framing positions the seeming problem of his child’s cognitive disability as one that could be solved, or at least ameliorated, by the clear, level-headed thinking of gentlemen. His praise of Goddard and his endorsement of his expert way of thinking reach a crescendo in the next two paragraphs. Bleakmore writes:

I am sure we shall feel an everlasting sense of obligation to you both for making it possible for us to know the situation definitely and clearly. It is much better that we should know it in order that we may face it squarely and with intelligence. (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers)

Yet knowing the situation definitely and clearly, at this point, is an ideal, not the reality. Bleakmore pleads:

It just seems that I MUST know something about the situation that my wife failed to ascertain. I have considered the way in which I could bother you the least and it seemed if I were to set forth my questions on a sheet of paper and leave room for you to put down the answers, that this would take less of your time and effort than any other means I could devise.

I am, therefore, inclosing such a set of questions and am wording them so that very short answers will suffice. Will you please be good enough to send me these answers at your convenience? Inasmuch as you accept no compensation, it seems that I must be imposing upon you to ask this further favor, but it means so much to us just now to know these things that I am taking the liberty of asking this additional favor of you. (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers)

Bleakmore’s questions are lost. Although we do not know what the questions were, we can deduce how they were rhetorically framed and positioned. When he capitalizes ‘MUST,’ Bleakmore reveals his adherence to the ways of knowing produced by eugenic ‘science.’ As salient as this allegiance may be, the dilemma he confronts is equally clear: the diagnosis of science is inadequate, and this passage critiques as much as it praises. Gaps in understanding exist, and Goddard’s explanation, mediated through Bleakmore’s wife, has produced more questions than it answered. The diagnosis of their child as a ‘mentally defective child of the mongoloid type’ hardly solves the problem and thrusts Bleakmore into a new reality of providing for a child with a cognitive disability. As poignant as the implications Bleakmore makes are, they lie under a carefully crafted façade of admiration and polite deference. The first clause in this passage is grammatically tentative: ‘It just seems that.’ Bleakmore grammatically couches his critique that Goddard’s analysis has left gaps and has failed to address key questions that ‘MUST’ be known. Yet politeness rules the day, and Bleakmore goes so far as to fault his wife for this gap, before faulting the eugenic expert himself.

Such politeness might be read as superficial, but scholars cannot ignore rhetorical strategies producing the textual space needed to develop a crafty appeal to and critique of a eugenic expert. Bleakmore’s efforts succeed, and he persuades Goddard to reply meaningfully to the questions he posed. This reply is lost, but Bleakmore’s thank-you note survives. A mere four days after his initial letter, Bleakmore wrote to Goddard: ‘I want to thank you most sincerely for answering the various questions I set forth in my query and for your splendid letter.’ Bleakmore has succeeded in controlling the terms and inquiries of the parent/expert interaction. Nonetheless, Goddard’s response works to preserve his authority and ensure that Bleakmore continued to participate in Goddard’s ways of approaching cognitive disability. Bleakmore writes:

Since receiving these both myself and my wife feel much better over the situation. We have come to the decision to keep the child in our home until he is six years of age, and then send him to Vineland. I am sending for the book you mention. I am certainly very glad there is such information available. (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers)

Revealing that he and his wife have chosen to send their child to Vineland Training School, where Goddard worked and rose to national prominence, Bleakmore’s reply illustrates his continued adherence to a particular way of approaching cognitive disability. He agrees to obtain the books that will facilitate his understanding of a problem of knowledge. However, his agreement does not negate the ways in which he previously achieved and exerted agency.

In contrast to Bleakmore, Sarah Jones wrote to Goddard well after the diagnosis of her daughter as ‘mentally deficient.’ ‘This to tell you of the progress of our child Nancy, who is the best and dearest and most normal of nice little girls,’ she writes to Goddard in a long handwritten letter on 20 November 1929 (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers). Jones’s assertion of her daughter’s normality is striking when viewed in light of her many allusions to her daughter’s cognitive difference: ‘We went through a time of struggle and rebellion during which my soul grew wrinkles and grey hairs.’ Jones alludes to her daughter’s abnormality by narrating it through traditional tropes of stubbornness, disobedience, and also the general struggle seen in Johnson’s account of her brother-in-law. Cognitive limitations are most powerfully foregrounded when her daughter herself alludes to them in dialog, as Jones recalls several brief exchanges:

She came to me and said: ‘Mother what would happen if I ran away?’ ’Some description would be broadcast over the country and you’d be returned to me,’ said I. ‘Alright …’ said she, ‘I’ll wait until I’m of age and then I’ll go out and lead my own life.’ (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers)

As evidenced by literary texts like Jack London’s ‘Told in the Drooling Ward’ (1916), the topos of the runaway child or resident with a cognitive disability occurred in early-twentieth-century discourses of cognitive disability. In the mini-narrative that Jones composes, her daughter approaches this topos inquisitively and then rationalizes a fairly appropriate response to such a possibility: not to run away, but to wait and to venture out on her own when she is fully mature. Jones’s daughter normalizes herself, or at least Jones narrates her daughter so that she comes off as clearheaded, rational, and cognitively normal.

In the two paragraphs that follow, Jones tests the line between normalcy and mentally deficiency that her daughter teeters on. She stresses that her daughter is an ‘intelligent child in a variety of ways’ (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers). She notes that ‘her hands obey her; she can do things with them’ and, in contrast with ‘her ancestors,’ her daughter ‘handles money with caution and discrimination.’ Furthermore, she is the figure of bodily health. ‘She loves all outdoor things … she wishes she had more chances to hike.’ However, although bodily, intellectually, and morally fit, her academic performance has flagged. ‘But a student she is not,’ Jones reflects. Sister Kit, presumably one of her daughter’s instructors, ‘persuade[d] her to try to prepare for college’ and, in conversation with Jones, argued ‘she must be taught logical thinking.’ The academic subjects that ground logical and collegial thinking – Latin and Algebra – prove impossible for her daughter, and Jones reveals that ‘her report card except for gym, piano and art was all in red ink.’ This ‘absolute failure’ compels Jones to confer with school staff about a revised curriculum – composed of piano, choir, glee club, and gymnastics – one better suited to her daughter’s disposition.

In an effort to ensure that Goddard does not read her daughter’s academic struggles as signs of deficiency, Jones writes:

She has an excellent vocabulary and uses words like endeavor, casual, influential, and vivid with accuracy and ease. The other night she called someone (as I thought) an idiot and I said something about a fool. ‘Ok, no, Mother,’ said she, ’a fool is a stupid person, an idiot is mentally deficient, but an ijjit – i-j-j-i-t – is a witty clever humorous person who makes lovely nonsense out of everything.’ Nothing mentally deficient about that, was there? (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers)

Jones refutes the notion that her daughter may have a low ‘mental age’ – an intellectual barometer that Goddard popularized. As Zenderland (2001, 242) notes, ‘questions designed for higher mental ages’ on Goddard’s intelligence tests demanded considerable language skills. Goddard asked test-takers to define various vocabulary words. Zenderland observes that ‘Among the questions measuring “abstract thinking” among twelve year olds, for instance, were several asking for definitions. “What is charity?” intelligence testers asked. “What is justice”?’ The most powerful argument Jones crafts about her daughter’s intelligence is her ability to engage abstract definitions of her own alleged mental deficiency. She defines conventional ideas of both the popular fool and medically diagnosed idiot. After dismissing these terms, she introduces a colloquial term, ‘ijjit,’ reinforces the term by spelling it out, and then assigns the term to her own identity, so that it suits the identity crafted in the earlier paragraphs – a girl who although not savvy with algebra, loves to hike, play the piano, and engage in quick-witted dialog.⁸ Although Jones asserts that her daughter calls someone else an ‘ijjit,’ the term best applies to her daughter when read in context of the letter. Her daughter’s alleged deficiency comes clearly in view only when she refutes it, a contestation which is communicated succinctly in the final rhetorical question.⁹ What Jones’s daughter (and Jones herself) ‘makes lovely nonsense out of’ are certain popular and medical assessments of her own struggle.¹⁰

Jones ends her letter by noting that she and her daughter have overcome such struggle.¹¹ ‘So we are coming on very pleasantly,’ she writes, ‘and I am comfortable about her for the first time in my life’ (Henry Herbert Goddard Papers). The hurdles that still confront her daughter are the product of ‘the girls she wants for friends but won’t bother with her.’ Her social limitations, Jones implies, are sure to be triumphed: ‘She has been pretty lonely, but she is infinitely patient, fills in the empty hours and [illegible] on making little advances which every now and again are rewarded.’ In fact, ‘her teachers, four or five girls in their twenties, are awfully good to her and … find her worth associating with, out of school as well as in.’ Thus, her daughter’s social struggles result because her youthful peers have not yet matured enough. The smart, professional adult women, who girls should aspire to be, value Jones’s daughter.

Jones concludes: ‘I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to be able to give you so good a report.’ She seems acutely aware of the act of narrating her daughter’s identity, development, and experiences. She notes that she had been asked to write it ‘long ago and I often thought of doing so, but couldn’t bring myself to tell the struggles we were going through together.’ Jones waits for the right, genuine moment that will allow her to tell what she believes is the true story of her daughter. In doing so, she undermines a professional request and, in the process, the authority of scientific observation and eugenic considerations of her daughter. Jones does not write from a space free of eugenic influence or the dominant theories of cognitive disability. She normalizes her daughter, and the narrative she tells ends as a conventional success story: ‘Today, she is a sweet, kind, well-balanced, obedient (except about wearing warm clothes) dear.’ Still, the choices she makes in framing, timing, and crafting her narrative reveal a rhetorical agency that allows her daughter’s experience to be individuated, not appropriated by a eugenic framework.

V. Conclusion

This study of letters exchanged between Goddard and parents of children with cognitive disabilities illustrates the value of attending to how eugenic thought (and theories of cognitive disability in general) are received, used, and reappropriated. Reception proves to be as dynamic a process as the production and dissemination of eugenic thought. Turning attention to reception gives value to the overlooked perspectives and rhetorical actions of families with children with cognitive disabilities. Shifting focus from the eugenic author to the eugenic reader is by no means easy. This transition requires creative and challenging archival work, as previous research by Stuckey (2011) and Borsay and Dale (2012) illustrates. More so than the established eugenicist, the parent can illustrate how individuals tried to make sense of cognitive disability in ways that balanced advocacy, acceptance, and resistance. Yet parent voices can only be heard by exploring archival folders that lie under piles of professional documents – authored by the most notorious eugenicists – which have traditionally caught the eyes of scholars. The recovered voices of historical parents are poised to enrich our understanding of the experiences of contemporary parents, who engage an even more complex network of authority and expertise.

So what, then, do these letters tell us? First, they remind scholars to keep a close eye on plain language that conceals more complex thought. Eugenic theories were not only internalized at the level of broad national consciousness, but at the level of the individual citizen. Close reading allows scholars to determine how eugenic rhetoric was processed and used at this individual level. As a methodology, close reading respects the parent’s voice and allows the scholar to reconstruct arguments that lie underneath layers of deference. Second, these letters debunk parent stereotypes that Carey and Borsay and Dale note scholars and activists frequently conjure. Even the most unassuming parents, who draft seemingly straightforward letters, argue with and work to persuade experts in subtle ways. The audience for American eugenics was studious, and parents developed a working knowledge of the field’s language, methods, and rhetoric; however, after adequately grounding themselves in the discourse, many citizens sought ways to make the profession work for them. Beyond internal advocacy, parents used their working knowledge of the field to create a platform from which they could critique and question the claims that eugenic authority made about their children. Finally, if families seem to cede rhetorical ground to expertise, they often do so in order attain a stronger rhetorical position. This phenomenon illustrates that parents are not passive recipients of eugenic thought, but rhetorically dexterous agents. Parents like Granderson, Bleakmore, and Jones rely on what Dolmage (2014b, 150) calls a rhetoric of mētis: ‘the cunning intelligence needed to adapt to and intervene in a world of change and chance.’ They move back and forth between particular roles: supplicant and critic, good student and skeptical mother. They duplicate professional rhetoric, genres, and language to subvert eugenic conclusions. Within their praise of expertise lie acts of resistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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.