by John Donvan
In Donald’s day, these doctors, upon examining him, would likely have referred to him with terms such as defective. And once a child had that label—whether due to Down syndrome, epilepsy, traumatic brain injury, or for reasons the doctors could not explain—parents quickly learned what they were expected to do: put their children away. Following doctors’ orders, thousands did so.
To be sure, the advice to institutionalize was never meant to be cruel, any more than the word “defective” was intended to disparage. At the time, it was simply a clinical term that denoted a disparity from normal functioning, equally applicable to a defective heart valve. The same was true, initially, when the words “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron” were designated, in 1902, to describe people operating with “mental ages” of—respectively—less than three years, three to seven years, and seven to ten years.
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the lexicon of disability also included “cretin,” “ignoramus,” “simpleton,” “maniac,” “lunatic,” “dullard,” “dunce,” “demented,” “deranged,” “schizoid,” “spastic,” “feebleminded,” and “psychotic.” Appearing in lectures and scholarly writings, these terms, when used by men of medicine, were intended only to be clinically descriptive and specific.
Inevitably, however, each of these words would be co-opted by the public and deployed out of their clinical context, used to mock, wound, and stigmatize. Such shifts in meaning forced the earliest professional organization for intellectual disability in the United States to go through five name changes in its history. Founded in 1876, the Association of Medical Officers of American Institutions for Idiotic and Feebleminded Persons became, in 1906, the American Association for the Study of the Feebleminded. In 1933, it was renamed the American Association on Mental Deficiency. In 1987, it became the American Association on Mental Retardation, and, in 2006, the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. “Retarded,” once one of the most neutral terms in the vocabulary of disability—a high-toned way of saying “delayed”—had long since become the root word for a variety of slurs in the culture at large.
Another term in this category was “mongoloid,” used to describe people born with Down syndrome. Later regarded as a double insult, because of its racial connotations, it was at one time so widely accepted that Benjamin Spock used a variant of it in the first edition of his bestselling book on parenting. The term disappeared from later editions, along with Spock’s advice to parents of children with Down syndrome. His original counsel was, of course, nothing more than the conventional wisdom of the time—the advice nearly all parents were given when they were told that their child was going to grow up to be a good deal different from “normal.”
For parents who planned simply to embrace the child, to make him or her part of the family, the advice from doctors was blunt.
Don’t.
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“YOU KNOW MORE than you think you do,” Spock told mothers in his classic book, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946. It was the most quoted line of a work that would be translated into thirty-nine languages and become one of the bestselling books in history. That reassuring sentiment, like the book itself, struck a chord with young women who felt thrown off balance by the cottage industry of “experts” giving childrearing advice that sprang up in the United States in the early 1900s. Many mothers began to fear that they were getting it all wrong—ruining their children’s lives and failing at what the experts cast as a woman’s most important contribution to society.
But here was Benjamin Spock—a Harvard graduate and a pediatrician—suggesting that everyone just relax. Spock scoffed at the prevailing view that babies’ lives conform to strict schedules, and that too much attention and coddling was a bad thing. Spock was all for love and affection and for women trusting their own instincts.
But in his first 1946 edition, he drew the line when a “Mongolian” baby entered the picture. In a section called “Special Problems,” he strongly urged that such a child be placed in an institution, and quickly. “It is usually recommended that this be done right after birth,” Spock wrote. “Then the parents will not become too wrapped up in a child who will never develop very far, and they will have more attention to give to their children who need it.” In a later edition, he appeared to recognize that parents might resist taking this step. “If placement in a nursing home or school is going to prove inevitable,” he wrote, “it’s better for the suggestion to come from the professional person rather than be left to the parents who become very guilty thinking about it.”
The rush to institutionalize mentally challenged children in the early twentieth century, when so much shame was attached to a child who was not “normal,” meant that very few families publicly discussed the challenges of raising these children. Memoirs of raising disabled children barely exist from this era, and the few that were published plainly show the pressure parents faced to rid their homes of children whose disabilities might burden the entire family.
Attorney John P. Frank gave a moving account of just this struggle in his 1954 book, My Son’s Story. Frank’s son Petey had been born in 1947 with a malformation in his brain that severely impaired his growth, his speech, and his intellect. The idea of sending Petey away to an institution at the age of two broke Frank’s heart, but he never questioned the necessity of doing so, because it was recommended to him by every single doctor he consulted.
Frank also received heartfelt letters from not one but two justices of the Supreme Court, where he had clerked, who also urged a separation. Justice Wiley Rutledge told him of close friends who had hesitated to institutionalize a disabled girl and had come to regret it. “The parents would have been much better off throughout those long years of suffering,” Rutledge told him, if they had only sent her away early. Justice Hugo Black told of a family whose decision to raise an intellectually disabled boy at home had “cast a blight over the lives of the parents and the children.” Black urged his former clerk to avoid the same mistake and find a proper place for Petey. In the end, a placement was arranged, in a setting where he was looked after by nuns and where Petey’s mother visited him regularly for the rest of her life. Petey died there in 2010.
Like Beamon Triplett, John Frank was a well-educated lawyer. Spock thought social class and education were important parts of the decision to institutionalize. The higher a family stood on the social ladder, the more sense it made to send a child away. In some few cases, he wrote, if the child is truly “responsive, loved and enjoyed by the family, everyone will be happier if he stays at home.” But he thought that shame worked against this outcome. “Sadly enough,” he wrote, the “child whose parents have had only an average amount of schooling and are living happily on a modest scale makes out better.”
There were, then, squadrons of babies and toddlers, both before Spock and after, exiled from their homes, generally forever. Often families postponed the separation by a few years, because institutions tended not to take the very youngest children. It was a stage the parents passed through in isolation, confiding only to people in their inner circle. And no matter how often doctors and friends and Spock tried to talk these mothers and fathers out of feeling shame, the silence that accompanied the disappearance only reinforced that feeling. They had sent away their children in secret, and in time, the children themselves became secrets, never to be spoken of again.
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THERE HAD BEEN a light in Donald’s eyes before the Preventorium. Whatever his peculiarities, he had always been noisy and active, curious and creative. Yes, people seemed to baffle him, but with things he enjoyed a solid and satisfying relationship. He could be mesmerized by numbers and notes, or lose himself in the contemplation of lists and patterns. These objects and abstractions were his connections to the world, his points of give-and-take. Even when he was demanding and stubborn, he was an irrepressible presence. But all of that went dead at the Preventorium, and almost all
at once.
A photograph of Donald exists from this period, in a small hardbound report published in 1939. It is titled The Mississippi State Sanatorium, A Book of Information, and on page 33, there is Donald, concrete and spiritless, posed on some steps. The photo is captioned “Preventorium Children,” and in it Donald is surrounded by a dozen other kids, who are clearly reacting to something amusing. The kids are beaming, caught off guard by the joke, one girl giggling behind her fingers, the others grinning past the camera or at one another.
All but Donald. Seated in the middle, looking smaller than anyone else, he remains rigid, eyes fixed on the lens, a dead stare, lips locked in a slight frown. Donald had gone silent. The boisterous ball of fire his mother could barely contain now “faded away physically,” according to a doctor who examined Donald. Though the place was a swirl of activity, the daily routine packed full with meals and lessons and playground visits and naptimes, the doctor noted that Donald “sat motionless, not paying attention to anything.” Blocks, books, toy trucks, pots and pans—he stopped reaching for them. The examining doctor later concluded: “It seems that he had there his worst phase.”
His parents must have been able to see how poorly Donald was doing at the Preventorium. The place allowed twice-monthly visits from families, always conducted outdoors on the grounds. One afternoon, during one of these visits, someone snapped a photo of Donald and his dad out on the great lawn together. Both are facing the photographer, Beamon crouched down so that he is glancing up at his son, his hands encircling Donald’s waist. Beamon grins widely, coaxingly, straining to make the picture work. Donald wears an expression that is hard to interpret—somewhere between complaint and confusion. The boy who once smiled for the camera is no longer smiling.
Time after time, these visits would end with Donald being led back inside through the imposing white columns, and with Mary and Beamon driving away, silencing every instinct they felt to take him back home.
In 1938, Mary and Beamon had a second child, a boy they named Oliver. He arrived in May, about nine months after they had driven with Donald to Sanatorium. It felt like they were making a new start. Over and over again, Mary had been told things like: Move on with your life. Have more children. Devote yourself to the ones who can benefit from it. Now she was complying with at least the second part of the prescription. And there could be no doubt that, after Donald left, and before the second baby came, the Triplett household had become more convenient to live in, more like the one she grew up in. One in which she and Beamon could enjoy quiet conversation over supper; where they didn’t hesitate to have people over; where at last she could get a full night’s sleep every night.
Once baby Oliver arrived, the three of them could go out and, to any casual passerby, look the part of a typical young American family, baby in tow, parents focused on his future. Finally, they were living the model of parenthood Mary and Beamon had imagined for themselves—the one the magazines talked about when they dispensed advice on how to survive the strains and uncertainties that could overwhelm a young mother.
For Mary, the ordinariness of those strains was a blessing. At the same time, she knew that if those casual passersby knew there was a Donald, many of them would have reassessed the “model couple” walking past with the baby in the stroller. Donald, even in exile, would be seen as a stain on the family. Reactions would range from pity to contempt, for the values of the day were unforgiving. Mary and Beamon’s bloodlines, once crossed, had produced a “defective” child.
There is no way for us to know how much shame Mary and Beamon felt, but we know that during their youth, a campaign was under way, fought by intelligent, zealous, and influential Americans who believed that children like Donald were a danger to society and, worse, not fully human. This campaign had an enormous effect on how mental disability was perceived in the United States, not only when Donald was a child but for decades afterward. In a very real way, Donald, four years old and shut away, with only his parents to stand up for him, had enemies out there.
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IF THERE WAS a model family, it was the Kelleys of Isle of Hope, Georgia. The front-page headline in the Savannah Press told the story in 1924: KELLEYS WIN IN “FITTER FAMILIES” CONTEST. The medal winners were pictured as well: James Kelley, a teacher and school principal, sits unsmiling but serene, with his two well-groomed young daughters, Elizabeth and Priscilla, positioned on either side of him; his wife, also identified as a teacher but never named, stands behind them, not smiling either.
Their scores, recorded while the Kelleys were at the Georgia State Fair, had astonished the national contest organizer, a Mrs. Watts, who was struck giddy at finding such talent in a part of the South where, until then, she had not run tests. “Kansas still has the high-score family so far,” she told the Press reporter, “but it is a question how long they can hold it. Georgia is a close second.”
A matronly presence, impeccable in appearance, draped in pearls that swung to her waist, Mrs. Watts had been organizing Fitter Family Contests across the South and Midwest since 1921. Over the next several years, these contests would also take place in Texas and Louisiana, and as far north as Michigan and Massachusetts, often with a healthy dose of newspaper coverage. It was great human-interest stuff.
Mrs. Watts staged her contests at state agricultural fairs, always timed to overlap with the main event—the livestock contests. Farmers had trucked in their best-looking cattle, their most perfect pigs, to compete for blue ribbons. The judges, fellow farmers, gave prizes for breeding animals that came as close as possible to flawless examples of their species. Better-bred animals, when crossed again and again, led to unending improvement in the stock of the breed.
Mrs. Watts had the same goal for humans. “While the [cattle] judges are testing the Holsteins, Jerseys and whitefaces,” Watts once said, “we are testing the Joneses, Smiths and the Johnsons.” When she declared the Kelleys to be “of the highest type,” she meant that they were the sort of Americans who should be encouraged—exhorted, even—to reproduce.
They had been examined by an expert team that included a dentist, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a pathologist, a pediatrician, and a historian. They’d had their urine tested; their skulls measured; their teeth evaluated for the orderliness of their alignment and the durability of their enamel. They were asked about childhood diseases, broken bones, and bathing schedules. Mothers were required to provide a list of daily meals, which was assessed for the percentage of protein versus non-protein. And each family member was observed chewing food, with notes taken when this was performed “too slowly” or “too hastily.” There was also a written IQ test—timed—that the children, as well as the adults, had to complete.
The wild card for every contestant, however, was ancestry. The Fitter Family Contests were designed to get something across to the masses: a rudimentary understanding of the way human genetics determined all that was good and evil about modern American society. A hand-painted sign hanging by the entrance to the competition booth carried an urgent warning:
EVERY 48 SECONDS A PERSON IS BORN IN THE UNITED STATES WHO WILL NEVER GROW UP MENTALLY BEYOND THAT STAGE OF A NORMAL 8 YR. OLD BOY OR GIRL.
A second sign added perspective:
EVERY 15 SECONDS $100 OF YOUR MONEY GOES FOR THE CARE OF PERSONS WITH BAD HEREDITY SUCH AS THE INSANE, FEEBLEMINDED, CRIMINALS AND OTHER DEFECTIVES.
And a third offered hope:
EVERY 7½ MINUTES A HIGH-GRADE PERSON IS BORN IN THE UNITED STATES.
An electric lightbulb was affixed to each sign, flashing on at the appropriate intervals: every forty-eight seconds, every fifteen seconds, and, much too infrequently, every seven and a half minutes. Good heredity was falling behind at an alarming rate.
It had to be a rude shock for families that went into these contests concerned about the dire message of the lightbulbs, only to come out with a flunking grade. They would leave the state fairgrounds that day branded unfit for America. But this was useful knowledge,
in its way, because if Mrs. Watts’s hopes for these contests were to be fulfilled, a failing family would know never to procreate, for the good of society. And those from families “of good stock” would know never to let their children mate with someone from an unfortunately blighted family.
The caliber of the herd as a whole is lifted when only the best of its members are permitted to breed. Obviously, that applied to humans as well.
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MARY AND BEAMON TRIPLETT came of age during the era of the Fitter Family Contests. People of lesser mental capability were portrayed as a menace to society, and extreme measures were justified to eliminate that menace. This was not merely theoretical, and not nearly as benign as the smiling Mrs. Watts made it out to be with her quaint contests. Her operation was merely the extreme retail end of a scientific, political, and philosophical movement that, in the two decades leading up to Donald’s birth, had dedicated itself to the proposition that children like him didn’t deserve to be born. In the movement as a whole, Mrs. Watts was a bit player, a self-appointed and enthusiastic popularizer, civic-minded and hardworking, but not a scientist, academic, or statesman.
But those levels of society were well represented in the movement as well. At Harvard and Yale, in the pages of the New York Times and the Saturday Evening Post, and in the hearing rooms of Congress, men who stood at the pinnacle of their fields and of society had embraced, in a burst of optimism, a brand-new science.
Eugenics—derived from a combination of other relatively new sciences like anthropology, zoology, genetics, and psychometrics—opened up the possibility of purging rot and impurity from the lineage of humanity. President Teddy Roosevelt himself touted a eugenics manifesto called The Passing of the Great Race, written by his friend, New York lawyer Madison Grant. In his book, Grant recommended a program of mass selective breeding to rid the United States of the genetic influence of “the weak, the broken, the mentally crippled,” the millions of citizens he deemed “worthless” and “wretched.” Roosevelt praised the book’s compendium of “facts our people most need to realize.” A young man wrote Grant a fan letter from Austria, announcing that his book was now his “bible.” His name was Adolf Hitler.