A Disability History of the United States

In Chapter 3, Nielsen describes Otis as a “revolutionary thinker and hero” and points out that he was credited with the phrase “taxation without representation is tyranny” (33). Born in Massachusetts in 1725, Otis was “believed to have developed insanity, but his prior political leadership, and his family’s money and stability, meant that he experienced a less traumatic community response” (33). By recounting Otis’s story, Nielsen illustrates how disability intersects with other identity factors including race, gender, and class; hence, she shows that Otis’s own experience with disability was inflected by his political and class privilege.

Dix was a social reformer and advocate for people with mental illness who was active in the middle part of the 19th century. In Chapter 4, Nielsen discusses Dix’s political reform efforts, which came about because she was shocked at the abuse and conditions that she witnessed while giving religious instructions in various institutions. According to Nielsen, Dix used the moral righteousness and authority attributed to her class, gender, and race to make a career for herself “publicizing and attempting to improve asylum conditions” (70-71).

Nielsen begins Chapter 5 with a poem composed by Perrine, a Union soldier who was injured in the Civil War battle of Chancellorsville, resulting in amputation of his arm. Perrine, who went on to serve in the Invalid Corps after his amputation, uses his poem to describe his fiancée breaking off their marriage engagement after his return from war due to his acquired disability.

Born in 1873, Tiegel grew up in Pittsburgh and became deaf and blind in one eye due to spinal meningitis as a child. Tiegel first attended public schools, then the Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, and then the National Deaf-Mute College in Washington, DC, which was later renamed Gallaudet College. In 1893, Tiegel became the first woman to graduate from Gallaudet. As the 1893 class valedictorian, Tiegel delivered an address entitled “The Intellect of Woman,” in which she “drew connections between the racism that undergirded slavery and the sexism that undergirded the lack of educational opportunities for women, for both claimed that deficient bodies rendered women and African Americans unfit for a full civic life” (95-96).

Born in Iowa in 1880, Laughlin was an educator who served as the superintendent of the Eugenics Records Office. Like other advocates of eugenics, Laughlin believed that “the way to improve society was through better human breeding practices so that only those with ‘positive’ hereditary traits reproduce” (101). Nielsen argues that Laughlin’s model sterilization law became internationally renowned and was “eventually taken up by Adolf Hitler in his own bid for a national racial purity” (102).

Smith was a New Jersey woman with epilepsy who, in 1912 at the age of 28, was ordered to be sterilized by the “New Jersey Board of Examiners of Feeble-Minded (Including Idiots, Imbeciles, and Morons), Epileptics, Criminals, and Other Defectives” (110). While little is known about Smith’s background and her later life, her case reached the New Jersey Supreme Court, where the decision to sterilize her was overturned on the basis that it violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. Nielsen notes, however, that “the court did not take up more complicated legal question of whether or not sterilization statutes were constitutional” and that in 1927, the US Supreme Court ruled in Buck v. Bell that statutes calling for sterilization did not violate the 14th Amendment (117).

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the 32nd President of the United States, from 1933 until his death in 1945. Roosevelt is a major figure in the history of disability in the United States, not only because of his policies as part of the New Deal but also because he contracted polio in 1921 and was paralyzed from the waist down. In regard to his time as president, Nielsen writes that “while many knew of his past with polio, he, the media, and those around him colluded in hiding the extent of his disability” (139). Roosevelt founded the famous polio rehabilitation center Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation in Warm Springs, Georgia, and partially designed the facilities, which were “an early example of architectural accessibility” (140).