Conclusion

By the 1920s, people with many different types and origins of disabilities—from tuberculosis and feeble-mindedness to amputations and blindness—had been pushed out of the paid labor market and, thereby, edged out from “good citizenship.” Most people with disabilities kept on working, although their labors were rarely recognized or compensated as such. The “problem” of disability, however, lay not in the actual bodies of disabled people, but rather in the meanings assigned to those impairments by employers and policy makers, as well as how those meanings intersected with shifting family capacities, a rapidly changing workplace, public policies aimed at discouraging dependency, and the complexity and mutability of disability itself....

Saving the Human Wreckage Cast on the Industrial Scrap Heap

As workers with a wide array of both acquired and congenital disabilities lost access to the paid labor market, legislators and reformers began to search for a way to return people with disabilities to productivity and self-support. Influenced by the Protestant work ethic and the long-standing association of dependency with poor citizenship, rehabilitators tended to focus more on restoring their clients’ putatively damaged morality than on determining how to integrate disabled people into the wage labor market. Nevertheless, vocational rehabilitation programs did offer some disabled people and their families modest incomes during times of considerable stress. Chapter 6 traces the emergence of Goodwill Industries and the ways in which its sheltered workshops replicated mainstream employers’ use of piecework and concerns with efficiency—dynamics that led managers to exclude many disabled workers as too inefficient. Due to the complexity of disability and the ways that it intersected with age, gender, and family status, few clients moved into the outside labor force.

We Do Not Prefer Cripples, but They Can Earn Full Wages

Chapter 4 opens by investigating the ways in which working-class communities and workers had traditionally understood disability: as an anticipated, if feared, outcome of working life, but not as a cause for stigma. While bodily modifications such as missing fingers, crushed limbs, blinded eyes, or weakened lungs often brought a loss of skill and income, injured workers continued to work, often in the informal labor market. Mechanization and the drive for efficiency, however, provided employers with new notions of what made a good worker. With the striking exception of the Ford Motor Company, almost all major industrial employers began to believe that a modern, mechanized, and efficient workplace required employees with intact, interchangeable bodies. Henry Ford, however, demonstrated that, if carefully handled, mechanization could actually expand the range of employable bodies.

The Duty to Make Himself a Useful, Self-Supporting Citizen

As Chapter 7 shows, veterans and rehabilitators clashed over how to define disability and rehabilitation, in part because new tools of war caused so many injuries that led to chronic pain. Often, veterans found that their disabilities did not qualify them for training even when they could not find work, that rehabilitation did not meet their family’s economic needs, and that even after training they could not locate jobs in their fields. In effect, the ways in which policy makers had attempted to generalize disability failed to encompass its diversity, its mutability within and across individuals, how it was reshaped by the shifting economic context, and the ways that technological shifts produced unexpected new impairments. The program’s storied administrative dysfunction did not help. In the end, many disabled veterans, especially white ones, ultimately found employment—some equivalent to their prewar earnings. But much of their success was due to the fact that most employers were more willing to hire veterans with disabilities than disabled civilians. Significant numbers, moreover, struggled to manage chronic pain and other impairments and remained on the margins of the economy.

I Wish to Thank You for My Freedom

As Charles Bernstein demonstrated at New York’s Rome State Custodial Asylum, even the early twentieth century job market still allowed for a spectrum of ability, if carefully analyzed. Individual employers, in turn, and transition services could substitute for absent relatives. Chapter 3 explores how, during the 1910s and 1920s, Bernstein moved hundreds of people labeled “feeble-minded”—most of whom lacked families—into paid positions as farm laborers, domestic servants, laundresses, and seamstresses. The superintendents of dozens of other institutions for the feeble-minded across the nation copied his program, in part because it offered a means for addressing relentless pressure for new admissions and perpetual funding challenges. By providing what were, in effect, early group homes and astutely fitting people to appropriate positions, Bernstein managed to turn many, albeit not most, asylum inmates into wage workers living in mainstream society.

Her Mother Did Not Like to Have Her Learn to Work

Chapter 1 uses the nationwide spread of idiot asylums in the mid-nineteenth century as a lens into how families understood productivity and issues of care prior to the emergence of large-scale wage labor and intense urbanization. Although superintendents of asylums depicted “idiots” as unproductive, immoral drains on society, in part to obtain funding from lawmakers, families resisted these pejorative depictions. Relatives viewed productivity as a spectrum that varied by age, gender, and ability, reflecting the fact that people with a wide range of bodily capabilities had long participated in household economies and the wage labor market.

The Greatest Handicap Suffered by Crippled Workers

As Chapter 5 shows, another public policy intended to prevent dependency—workmen’s compensation—greatly exacerbated disabled workers’ difficulties on the mainstream labor market. Originally intended to aid families who had lost a breadwinner to death or disability, compensation laws could not encompass the immense diversity of disabilities and their mutability over time. The statutes also did nothing to address the long-term financial challenges faced by workers who became permanently disabled. Due to the segregated nature of the labor force, furthermore, rarely did women and African Americans receive compensation for their work-induced illnesses and disabilities. Making matters worse, the structure of compensation tables created financial incentives for employers to exclude workers with disabilities, regardless of their origin. By the 1920s, nearly all major employers made it a practice to require physical examinations before hiring workers. Even Ford Motor Company substantially reduced its hiring of new workers with disabilities, although it retained many existing ones.

Introduction

In the 1870s, Lily Westbrooke was an unassuming, ordinary resident of the New York State Asylum for Idiots. An “industrious and faithful worker,” she spent her days laboring in the institution’s laundry, where she had “assume[d] the responsibility of looking after a great deal of the children’s clothing.” An affectionate woman who loved taking charge of younger pupils, Westbrooke had come far since arriving at the asylum from a “pauper” family in 1858 as a bashful nine-year-old who understood only simple language and was unaware that “printed words stood for objects of any kinds.” Now a “great talker” and an avid reader, she showed no signs of the obstinacy, violent temper, and reputed “moral deficiency” that Madison County Poorhouse officials claimed had led them to send her to the Asylum for Idiots in the first place....

He Had No Home but the County Poor House

Chapter 2 explores how the shift to an unpredictable, urban wage economy left many families unable to care for or make use of “idiotic” relatives who might be only partly productive. Complicating matters, charity policies intended to prevent public dependency—scientific charity programs and efforts to separate diverse poorhouse residents into specialized institutions—increasingly selected pupils who had no home to which they could return. In response to this rapidly increasing and permanent population, asylum directors allied with proto-eugenicists such as Josephine Shaw Lowell to convince lawmakers to fund dedicated custodial asylums for “feeble-minded” people. In these institutions, inmates’ labors no longer led to discharge. Instead, perceived abilities determined every facet of life, from institutional conditions to inmates’ likelihood of dying shortly after arrival, and often in perverse ways. Despite being depicted by superintendents as unemployable in mainstream society, “feeble-minded” women who were institutionally productive were much less likely to be discharged and remained for decades, performing vast amounts of unpaid care work that defrayed much of the costs of these custodial asylums. Nonetheless, for some inmates, their toils offered some meaning and a small measure of control over their lives.