It’s 1969, and at Mom’s request, I had agreed to recite an aliyah at Jeff’s bar mitzvah, a traditional role for family members to play at this Jewish rite of passage. I didn’t want to do it—I remember telling Mom that if she wanted me to stand at the Torah and chant a blessing, at least let me be honest and say it in English. Unlike Jeff and Mike, I hadn’t gone to Hebrew school, I hadn’t studied the language, and I didn’t have a bar mitzvah when I turned thirteen.
Mom saw it differently. Where I saw a charade, she saw an honor. It was a privilege to say an aliyah, to be called to the Torah. Please, she said, could you just do this for me? I found her request somewhat mystifying—we weren’t even regular members of the congregation—but it seemed important to her, so I took the short transliterated passage and did my best to make myself sound as if I had some idea what was coming out of my mouth.
Why did it matter to her? I didn’t know. I had heard her lament that I was the only one of her three sons not to attend Hebrew school (something to do with one of Dad’s many job changes and the family’s finances at the critical moment of enrollment), and the only one who didn’t stand for a bar mitzvah. (My reaction, meanwhile, was to say a private prayer of thanks to God for relieving me of the obligation to spend three afternoons a week waiting for the Hebrew school bus so I could sit in yet another classroom.) Maybe the aliyah was Mom’s way of saying, see, it’s okay, he turned out to be a good Jewish boy after all.
What if an authentic Hebrew speaker had said to me after the aliyah, “Good job for a beginner” or “Did it take long to memorize that?” With no pretense to protect, I could have said something close to the truth: “Not long, and it was an honor to participate.” But that’s the trouble with pretense—once it starts, how and where does it stop?
As soon as I identify myself, Millie Brodie hastens to tell me that she’s not sure she can help me. “It was a long time ago, and I don’t want to tell you something I don’t clearly remember.”
I like her immediately.
“I knew your mother. Bertha. She later changed it to Beth, which I didn’t blame her for,” Millie says.
She’s eighty-two now, which makes her seven years younger than Mom, a huge difference when you’re growing up. She wasn’t a friend of Mom’s, she explains, but saw a lot of her because she spent so much time with her cousins, Irene and Sylvia. She had a double tie to Irene and Sylvia’s parents: Her mom was Jacob Robinson’s sister, and her dad was Kate Robinson’s brother.
In 1929, when Millie was five, her family left the old neighborhood for Ypsilanti, about twenty-five miles away from Detroit. They moved back in 1934, when she was nine. By that time, her Uncle Jake and Aunt Kate were living next door to the Cohens in the apartment building at 2205 West Euclid, so she often saw Tillie, Mom, and Annie (she says she’s not sure she ever met Hyman) while visiting the Robinsons.
I can feel my pulse racing. Millie’s the first person I’ve found who knew Annie before her hospitalization, and my head is bursting with all the questions I want to ask, but it’s important not to skip the basics; I want to have enough information to cross-check her memories later.
“What do you remember about Annie?” I ask.
She pauses, sadness creeping into her voice. “Poor thing. She had braces on her leg. I was a little frightened of her. Intimidated. I don’t remember if her problem was mental. Her leg, that I remember.”
“She had a brace until she was about sixteen,” I say, “and then she got the wooden leg. It was about 1936, according to the hospital records.”
“Yes, I remember. I guess that’s part of what frightened me. It was foreign to me. Today, of course, they can do a lot more for you, and we’re much more familiar with those kinds of disabilities.”
She pauses again, trying to come up with the right words. “It’s embarrassing to think about how she was treated.”
“How was she treated?”
“We all sort of stayed away,” she says. “It’s hard for me to say that now. But back then we didn’t know any better. We didn’t say ‘disabled’ or ‘handicapped.’”
“Those were different times, Millie,” I interject. “I mean, the school where Annie went was called the Leland School for Crippled Children.”
Millie makes no reply. I decide to change the subject. “What about my mom?” I ask. “What was her relationship with Annie?”
“I don’t really know. I saw your mom taking care of Annie, but it always seemed to me that it was more out of obligation than devotion.”
Such an interesting observation. I underline the sentence in my notes. “What about my grandmother?”
“I remember her carrying around Annie on her back,” Millie says quickly, as if the memory had just popped into her head. “Annie wasn’t very big, so it must have been earlier.”
It’s an arresting image, my grandmother, weighed down, her burden on her back. But I’m doubtful. “It seems hard to believe,” I say. “By 1932, when my grandparents moved to Euclid, you were eight, Annie was already thirteen. Tillie wasn’t very big herself.”
“Well, that’s what I meant about my memory. It was a long time ago. But I have this picture of your grandmother, hunched over, carrying that poor child. I don’t know how old I was.”
Another image floats before my eyes—my grandmother’s rounded shoulders. Carrying Annie wouldn’t have been easy for anyone, but for my grandmother, with her scoliosis or whatever ailment had left her with that misshapen posture, it must have been excruciating.
“I heard a story,” Millie says. “Maybe I shouldn’t repeat it. I heard when Annie was born, the doctor knew right away that she wasn’t going to be normal.” True enough—Mona Evans had written in her Routine History that Annie’s leg was bent at birth and couldn’t be straightened out. “I heard that the doctor had said, ‘I can do something about this right now,’ but your grandmother wouldn’t hear of it.”
Do something about this right now? I stop myself from gasping. I grope for a question, and I’m silent long enough that Millie finally fills the vacuum. “I told you that maybe I shouldn’t repeat it,” she says.
“No,” I say. “True or not—and I find it hard to believe that it’s true—even the fact that such a story made the rounds says a lot about how the neighborhood saw Annie.”
The child who shouldn’t have lived. The child who shouldn’t have been born. The sins of the parents are paid for through their children.
Those are the thoughts running through my head as I try to make sense of what Millie has told me. Could this be anything other than rumor, speculation, perhaps some adult’s misguided way of describing how much of a burden Annie had become to her family? Why would such a story be repeated or given any credence?
Here’s why, I later learn: In the years before and after Annie’s birth in 1919, the American eugenics movement argued openly and vigorously for policies that would eliminate “defectives” from society and allow only the fittest to survive and procreate. The movement’s tireless campaign resulted in thirty state laws requiring the forced sterilization of those judged mentally or morally unfit, capped in 1927 by an 8-1 Supreme Court ruling in a Virginia case, Buck v. Bell, that declared such laws to be constitutional. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s majority opinion famously observed that “three generations of imbeciles was enough.” At the time, Holmes’s statement fit mainstream thought; only in recent decades has it come to be equated with all that was wrong with mainstream attitudes toward disability.
A Chicago surgeon, Harry J. Haiselden, championed the next logical step beyond sterilization. In the four years before Annie’s birth, Haiselden attracted national attention—and widespread approval—with his vocal crusade against intervening to save the lives of “defective” babies. His argument was one part eugenics, one part euthanasia (a word he never used himself): Infants with serious physical or mental defects posed a danger to society, he asserted, and the physician had a duty to protect future generations against those destined for
lives “without value.” Death for nature’s mistakes, as Haiselden called these children, was more merciful and more humane than a lifetime of suffering. “I am sure no jury of sane men would convict me of allowing a child to die who would be a burden to himself and to the community if permitted to live,” he declared in November 1915 when he personally alerted a Chicago newspaper reporter to the plight of “baby Bollinger,” the first of six cases that Haiselden used to gain a very public platform for his ideas.
Haiselden told the reporter that he had allowed other babies to die, but always quietly. Now the surgeon wanted to come out of the shadows, and he had chosen the case of baby Bollinger to make his public stand. The infant, born on November 12, 1915, at the German-American Hospital where Haiselden was chief of staff, had a variety of physical deformities, including a closed lower bowel, misshapen shoulders and neck, a missing auditory canal, and no right ear. Without corrective surgery to repair the intestinal problem, the boy would not survive. Haiselden, consulted by the attending physician, advised the infant’s parents, Allen and Anna Bollinger, that their son faced a life of mental and physical anguish. The Bollingers accepted his recommendation against treatment, and the surgeon summoned the Chicago press to the hospital for a first-hand look at the baby that he thought should not live.
“I have no doubt that I shall be called a cold-blooded murderer for allowing this baby to die,” the forty-four-year-old Haiselden said in an interview at the time. “I am prepared for bitter criticism. But its death is a question between me and my conscience. I would not kill the infant. I would not administer poison or take its life by any active surgical means. I shall merely stand by passively and let it die. I will let nature complete its bungled job.”
When a Chicago Daily Tribune reporter asked Haiselden how frequently such deaths were occurring, he openly suggested that some physicians were taking an active role in hastening death. “Many a child marked plainly as an idiot or badly deformed has been allowed to die by not tieing the umbilical cord. If the cord, which must be severed at birth, is not tied immediately after, the infant will die of loss of blood. I do not mean to say that children are permitted often to die by their physicians. But such deaths are not infrequent.”
I can do something about this right now.
In the five days between his birth and death, baby Bollinger blossomed into a household name, his misfortunes covered by major newspapers throughout the country. Haiselden and his ideas achieved a longer-lasting prominence; over the next year, Haiselden used a variety of avenues to push his agenda even further into the public consciousness. He invited photographers to the hospital, and urged them to publish pictures of the “defective” babies. The Hearst newspapers, which gave their editorial weight to Haiselden’s eugenics platform, published his first-hand account of the Bollinger case in a serialization that began just six days after the Bollinger baby’s death and ran for the next six weeks. Haiselden revealed that he had received pleas from anguished parents who wanted his help in finding a merciful way to end their children’s ill-fated lives; one such appeal came from the mother of a six-year-old impaired boy. These pleas proved, Haiselden suggested, that it would be better for everyone if these children had failed to live at birth.
Then, in late 1916, the surgeon took his campaign to the nation’s newest medium: the movies. The Black Stork, an hour-long feature film starring Haiselden himself as a doctor trying to prevent the birth of defective children, tells the fictional story of a husband with an unidentified hereditary disease who ignores the doctor’s warnings of the genetic risk of fathering a baby. The rest of the film is a graphic replay of the Bollinger case, with a religious twist: The couple’s baby is born with multiple deformities and needs surgery to live, but the mother agrees to withhold treatment after witnessing a horrific vision of the baby’s miserable future (as revealed by God). When the baby goes to his merciful death, his soul flies into Jesus’s waiting arms. The national advertising for the film, cowritten by Haiselden and a Hearst newspaper reporter, billed it “a eugenic love story.”
The Black Stork was no cult film. It played in a variety of mainstream theaters, not just in 1917 but also through the 1920s, outliving Haiselden, who died suddenly in 1919 during a stay in Cuba. But the movie often ran into opposition from local film boards, which found its graphic content too disturbing to be shown, according to Martin Pernick, a University of Michigan professor who unearthed and restored a print of the film while researching his 1996 book on Haiselden and his influence on popular culture.
The Black Stork, one of several dozen films with a eugenics message made during Annie’s childhood, was just one part of a national conversation about impaired newborns. “In the wake of Haiselden’s campaign,” Pernick writes in his book, “death became a widely discussed and often advocated measure for dealing with the unfit.” Pernick scoured newspapers in major cities, including Detroit, and found quotes or commentaries from more than three hundred physicians and public figures, many supportive of Haiselden’s position (and many others critical of his grandstanding style of advocacy). “Several doctors said they had allowed babies to die,” Pernick told me, “and others said they knew it went on.”
From time to time, Pernick said, the issue of merciful infanticide came back into the public eye. In the 1930s, when Millie Brodie heard the story about Annie’s birth, the euthanasia movement gained new popularity, prompting public opinion surveys to ask questions about the morality of mercy killings. In a 1937 poll, 45 percent of those interviewed agreed that “infants born permanently deformed or mentally handicapped” should be allowed to die.
This was the context for Millie’s story. When Annie was born, when her deformed leg wouldn’t straighten out, when she was carried around on my grandmother’s back, when she boarded the bus to attend the school for crippled children, when she “didn’t learn like she should,” a significant percentage of her neighbors and other Americans believed that a more humane world would exist if the number of Annies could be reduced or eliminated—and that the nation’s doctors had the background, training, and expertise to make the right choices. “You have to remember,” Pernick said, “that this was the era when many people believed then, much more than they do now, that science could make an objective determination of who should live and who should die.”
I can do something about this right now. There’s no way to know if the doctor who delivered Annie ever said that. But does it matter? To live in a neighborhood where people believed that such an offer was made—and to be the parents and sister of that sort of child, the sort of child thought to be such a burden to her family and society that, well, maybe she shouldn’t have lived in the first place—was that any less disturbing?
And what about Annie? What about her feelings? Surely a girl who could read, who complained to her mother that “normal” activities were forbidden to her, who had enough insight (according to Mona Evans’s Routine History) to want independence and yet understand that she would never achieve it, surely this sort of girl would have known something of the ongoing debate about how to deal with the crippled, the unfit, the deformed, the defective, the idiots, the imbeciles, the morons—labels that make us cringe now but were regarded in Annie’s younger days as neutral, scientific descriptions of the problem at hand.
As I try to imagine how Annie might have felt, I remember something, something I already knew but perhaps didn’t really understand, something that Mona Evans reported about Annie’s feelings. I consult Evans’s Routine History:
She asked the mother what kind of a casket she was going to buy for her, said that she did not want to die—she wanted to live, commented that everyone laughed at her and wanted to see her in her grave, but that she wouldn’t let them “get her.”
Paranoia, yes, but eliminate the implied persecution and overstatement, and don’t those words just about sum up the outcome that Haiselden and his many supporters would have preferred?
They wanted to see her in her grave.
“Did you know she went to Eloise?” I ask.
Yes, Millie says, but she was never sure of the reason. “It wasn’t discussed, no one talked about those things, and then I lost track of your mom at some point. I knew she got married, and moved away. I would hear about her from time to time, from Sylvia, maybe. I remember hearing that she had some sort of mental health problem of her own, nothing serious.”
Wow. “What did you hear?” I ask.
She doesn’t remember anything else. I reluctantly move on.
“Do you think Irene’s or Sylvia’s families would have photos from back then?” I ask. “I don’t have any of Annie.”
Millie thinks the chances are nil. “Annie wasn’t around. No one played with her.” I ask her for names of other people from the old neighborhood, and she suggests I call her brother, Martin. “He’s six years older, and he knew your mom better.” She gives me his phone number.
“You know,” Millie offers, “those years were really hard for your grandmother, raising those kids. She was really poor, and she didn’t have any support. I remember that Jacob Robinson tried to help—not financially, because he didn’t have much money either. No one had money back then. But maybe through his connections at the court.” (He worked at the Wayne County court clerk’s office, and eventually became the chief clerk.) “I had the impression he tried to get them some aid through the government.”
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