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Cure the defect or keep the people, Graham Bell and the old project of making deafness disappear
In Brief
- In the 1880s Graham Bell argued that schools for the deaf, by gathering pupils around a shared language of gesture, led them to marry one another and were breeding "a deaf variety of the human race."
- The marriage statistics of the period did not bear out the alarm: deaf couples mostly had hearing children, and inherited deafness ran through families with deaf relatives and, in part, through marriages between cousins.
- Marriage advice aimed at fewer deaf people; the pure oral method, which excluded signs from the classroom, at deaf people less distinct from the hearing.
- Deaf adults pushed back through their own associations and through petitions; in 1903, 2,671 who had passed through the schools of Great Britain and Ireland signed for a combined system rather than pure speech teaching.
Philanthropy, the argument went, had built a trap. In the 1880s Graham Bell turned the schools created to rescue deaf children into a cause for alarm. By gathering pupils together and binding them through a shared language of gesture, he argued, these institutions led deaf people to marry one another, and so were producing "a deaf variety of the human race" [1]. William Keith Brooks set out the claim for the readers of the Popular Science Monthly in 1885 [1, 2]. It looked like a demographic warning. It was in fact a program, one that tied heredity, marriage and the choice of language into a single question: should deaf people exist as a group at all?
The paradox is sharper for the distance already travelled. An encyclopedia article of 1878 recalled an old conviction that the deaf could not be taught, which led parents to let their children grow up without instruction, "exiled from the community of rational beings" [3]. Its author, Alfred Large, adds that some countries had made a practice of destroying children still unable to hear or speak at three, and that the code of Justinian declared deaf-mutes incapable of civil acts [3]. Education, on this account, meant admission to humanity. Bell kept the goal of integration but reversed the verdict on the means: the school that had brought the deaf into society now seemed to set them apart as a lineage. The debate that followed passed from statisticians to eugenicists, from teachers to lawmakers. It never settled who had the right to decide whether deafness was a defect to correct or the ground of a shared life.
Bell's paradox, the school as a breeding ground
Bell's argument moved the danger from the body to the institution. As Brooks reports it, the methods adopted "from the noblest and purest motives" to improve the lot of the deaf were also the most efficient means imaginable for inducing them to marry each other [1]. A summary published in the same magazine three years later spelled out the mechanism. Schools teaching a visual language that only their pupils understood drew them into close company; acquaintance ripened into friendship and love, and statistics, the summary claimed, showed a deaf variety of man in the making [4]. Inherited deafness was no longer only a family misfortune. Its spread also depended on a social arrangement, which meant it could be rearranged.
Nothing in this mechanism required force, and that is precisely what made it troubling to its critics. Brooks stresses that there was "no compulsion or infringement of personal liberty" [2]. Deaf people simply chose partners who knew the gesture-language and with whom they had been thrown together since childhood. Bell pressed the point to irony. If anyone wished to hasten the formation of a deaf race, he observed, one could devise a plan leading the deaf children of deaf parents to marry one another [5]. The mock-program went beyond what existing institutions were doing: most of the means, Brooks wrote, were already adopted, and the plan named further means to hasten the result. Free choice, exercised inside a separate world, became the problem to be solved.
The alarm rested on figures that looked solid. Among 5,823 deaf-mutes drawn from different parts of the country, Brooks counted 1,719, or 29.5 per cent, known to have deaf-mute relatives [6]. He read the contrast between those born deaf and those deafened later as proof of heredity. He also anticipated the obvious objection. Married deaf couples with hearing children proved nothing, he wrote, since heredity only required that deaf children be more frequent among them than in the community at large [7]. As a principle of statistics, the reasoning holds. Brooks declared the excess proved beyond question; whether the data of the period actually showed it was another matter.
What the reformers feared, some deaf people had openly wanted. Brooks records that plans for a community of deaf-mutes had been discussed many times by the deaf themselves, and that money had been publicly offered for the purpose [8]. One proposal went further still: laws securing the descent of land and property in the deaf line alone, so that hearing children would be led to leave [8]. The deaf variety was thus not only a eugenic nightmare. For some of those concerned it was a project of their own—a people seeking a place, read by others as a defect seeking to reproduce.
Darwin's 148 pupils, the figures that refused to obey
Inheritance was real, but it ran less through deaf marriages than Bell's alarm suggested. Charles Darwin, writing in 1868, had already called it a singular fact that deaf-mutes clustered in families while their parents were very rarely deaf themselves [9]. Not one of the 148 pupils present at the same time in the London Institution was the child of deaf parents. In Ireland, of 203 children born to a deaf-mute and a hearing partner, only one was mute [9]. The classroom, in other words, was filled by hearing families. If deafness was being bred anywhere, it was not mainly in deaf marriages.
Later surveys of deaf marriages pointed the same way. A report cited by Charles Dudley Warner found such marriages as fruitful as the average, yet only sixteen of them had produced deaf children, and some of those families had hearing children too [10]. The report concluded that deaf offspring from deaf parents was a remote prospect, while a deaf person was likely to have some other deaf relative [10]. Harry Best's survey The Deaf refined the picture. Intermarriage of the deaf mostly did not produce deaf children, and two deaf parents were not always riskier than one; what vastly raised the odds was congenital deafness in a parent, and above all deaf relatives [11]. Heredity followed lineages more than the mere fact of two deaf people marrying.
Another reading of the same evidence shifted the blame from deaf couples to cousins. Warner put Bell's worry in plain terms: since education and trades led deaf-mutes to marry, would this not multiply them? A Dr. Gillette thought not, pointing instead to consanguineous marriages, estimated to account for about ten per cent of deaf-mutes [12]. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica pushed the argument further. Noting pupils whose grandparents had been cousins, its contributor asked whether the fierce opponents of deaf marriages were trying to check "an effect instead of a cause" [13]. The conclusion kept the logic of prevention intact. It was the intermarriage of cousins, not of the deaf, that should be discouraged [13].
The choice of cause was also a choice of target. The same encyclopedia article charged investigators with a lopsided curiosity. They pursued the search for deaf ancestors through several generations, but asked about related grandparents for one generation only [14]. If the contributor's fear was right, the bias was built into the inquiry itself. A survey that hunts for deafness throughout a pedigree will find heredity in deaf marriages; one that hunts for cousins will find it in the customs of hearing families. What the numbers seemed to say depended on whom they were designed to watch.
Prevent the marriage, purify the speech
Eugenics gave the old suspicion a scientific grammar and a practical conclusion. A passage in Applied Eugenics credits an investigator with showing that congenital deafness was largely hereditary, much increased by consanguineous marriage, and that it mattered greatly to prevent the marriage of people in both of whose families it was present [15]. Michael F. Guyer, in Being Well-Born, went further. Treating the defect as a Mendelian recessive, he declared that two deaf-mutes should not have children, and deplored that such marriages took place every day [16]. His own caveat is revealing: someone from a family prone to deafness could, he judged, safely marry into a family without it [16]. The target was no longer the deaf individual. It was the meeting of two lineages.
From prescription to statute proved a short step. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, an American law, looks back on how the early science of genetics became the basis of state laws for the sterilization of people with presumed genetic defects, hearing loss among them [17]. Harry Best, writing long before, in the age of the eugenic debate, was more cautious. For him deafness was less a matter of eugenics than of medical science, and the deaf who married under unfavourable conditions were few [18]. Yet his restraint concerned the means, not the end. Every effort to remove or diminish deafness, he wrote, deserved the highest praise [18].
The second lever acted on language rather than on marriage, and it aimed at the same result. John Dutton Wright, in a guide for the mothers of deaf children, complained that the deaf had been differentiated too much from the hearing [19]. His remedy was pure oralism, applied from five to twenty years of age and "uncontaminated" by finger spelling or signs. It would, he promised, restore the deaf far more fully to a normal position in social and industrial life [19]. The case against deaf schools had blamed a shared visual language for drawing pupils together [4]. Wright's method removed that language from the school.
The fear behind the method surfaces in a single phrase. Wright wanted every taxpaying parent of a deaf child to be able to have that child taught by speech in a free public school, rather than sent out of the state or exposed to signs, "with the probability that he will leave school a deaf mute" [20]. Deaf-mute here names a child who leaves school without speech—the very outcome the method was meant to prevent. Recommendations recorded in the Encyclopaedia Britannica carried the logic into compulsion. Deaf children from seven to sixteen were to be compelled to attend school, and all were to be taught speech and lip-reading by the pure oral method unless physically or mentally disqualified [21]. Marriage advice and school policy, issued by different hands, pointed the same way: fewer deaf people from the one, deaf people less visibly deaf from the other.
The petition of 2,671, the league of elect surds
Those whose lives were at stake had an opinion, and they expressed it in numbers. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, itself no neutral witness since it pleads for signs throughout, found the ignoring of their sentiments by those in authority remarkable [22, 23]. Children, its contributor conceded, might be too young to know their own good; adults who had learned the value of their schooling in the battle of life were another case. In Germany, home of the pure oral method, 800 deaf people petitioned the emperor against it. In 1903, 2,671 deaf adults of Great Britain and Ireland who had passed through the schools signed a petition in favour of the combined system [22]. It was a vote on a method by its own graduates, and by this account authority did not heed it.
Even the leading adversary of signs conceded their power. The same article quotes Graham Bell, generally considered an opponent of the sign system, admitting that if the mind of the child alone were in view, "no language will reach the mind like the language of signs" [24]. The concession undoes part of his own case. Nor was sign language a school product that a reform could simply withdraw. The deaf child, the encyclopedia insists, expresses himself in signs of his own accord, and schools no more teach signs than recitation classes teach English to hearing children [23]. The 1888 summary had assumed the schools taught a visual language [4]. On this account they merely let one be used, and closing the classroom to it could drive it out of sight but not abolish it.
Harry Best, a sympathetic observer, read the tendency of the deaf to band together as ordinary sociology rather than pathology. To combat it, he argued, was to forget that like-minded people congregate—in a boys' athletic club, a church sewing circle or a masonic lodge as much as in a "league of elect surds" [25]. He accepted the charge of clannishness only as a consequence of deafness itself. Shut out of societies for the hearing, the deaf were forced to form their own, and they held that the good far outweighed the possible evils [26]. The separate world the reformers wanted to break up was, in this view, the condition of a social life.
Best's defence, however, stopped short of a separate people. He held deafness to be a serious and distressing affliction, yet found the deaf, in the company of deaf associates, as capable of happiness as any other group of human beings [27]. Yet his ideal remained assimilation: the deaf, he wrote, demanded to be regarded exactly as other people, only unable to hear [28]. So long as the public saw them as an unnatural portion of the race, he warned, they would remain strangers in the land where they lived [29]. Best placed the problem in hearing prejudice rather than in deaf bodies or deaf marriages. But his formula still measured equality by resemblance, and left open whether a community built on another language was a difference to respect or a gap to close.
The 19th-century campaign against a deaf variety of humanity rested on a simple chain: schools gathered deaf children, a shared sign language bound them, they married one another, and deafness multiplied. Warner's report granted that schooling led the deaf to marry one another; the evidence of the time contested the last link. Deaf pupils very rarely had deaf parents, as Darwin's count of London pupils showed, deaf couples mostly had hearing children, as later marriage surveys showed, and inherited deafness ran through families with deaf relatives and through cousin marriages more than through deaf couples [9, 10, 11, 12]. What survived the numbers was a preference: that deaf people be fewer, marry outside their own circle, and speak rather than sign. Eugenic writers turned it into marriage advice and some American states into sterilization laws, while school reformers recommended compulsory schooling and speech teaching by the pure oral method [15, 16, 17, 19, 21].
Deaf adults answered with petitions and with associations of their own, and their answer was recorded, then set aside [22, 26]. The question the campaign never settled was not medical but political: who is entitled to decide that a way of living is a defect to be corrected? Helen Keller, describing the deaf-blind person in a seeing and hearing world as a sailor among islanders whose language he does not know, put the asymmetry in six words: "He is one, they are many" [30]—though she drew from it that he must learn to see with their eyes and hear with their ears. The campaign against the deaf variety spoke from the side of the many, and called it cure.
