The Battle for Deaf Education: Clashing Methods, Minds, and Cultures in the Nineteenth Century United States

Sarah: In the mid-nineteenth century, a feud erupted between two camps of prominent public intellectuals and thought-leaders in the United States. The results of this feud affected the education, culture, and lives of generations of Americans. And yet, you have probably never heard of it.

Averill: Well, maybe you have – but we’re going to guess that a significant number of you haven’t! We’re referring to the feud between two camps of educators of deaf Americans. One the one side, the manualists, who believed that deaf people should be educated in manual methods in the form of sign language. On the other side, the oralists, who believed that deaf people should not use sign, but instead be educated in how to read lips and vocalize spoken English.

Sarah: It might be easy to see this as a just a schism between two pedagogical perspectives – is it better to teach using this method or that method? But this was about much more than educational approaches – instead, it became about the very place of deaf people in United States society. Thinkers and educators had spent decades of the nineteenth century debating the nature of deafness and the deaf mind: could deaf people think and reason without formalized language? Could they tell right from wrong, or were they animal-like? How might deaf people exist in a civil society if they did not share a common language? Were deaf people a distinct cultural group, or disabled individuals who could be assimilated? Today, we’re talking about the history of deaf people in the United States.

I’m Sarah

And I’m Averill

And we are your historians for this episode of Dig.

Sarah: Before we start, I want to be up front and say that there’s actually no way that we can tell a full Deaf history of the United States in one episode. So in this episode, we’re going to try to give a very broad introduction to deaf US history and then focus in on the debate over deaf education in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. This is in no way the entirety of Deaf American history, of course. It also runs the risk of overemphasizing some of the more negative or difficult aspects of Deaf history at the risk of underemphasizing Deaf joy, Deaf agency, and thriving Deaf cultures – but this reflects only what’s possible in one podcast episode, not our judgements of what we think is worth learning or sharing. And of course, for every episode, we rely on the hard work of many scholars! For this episode, we relied on the incredible and important work of Douglas Baynton, R. A. R. Edwards, Kim Neilsen, Susan Burch, and Katie Booth, among others. And THANK YOU to Gallaudet University’s accessible websites on Deaf history.

Averill : Sign language in the Americas has a history older than the United States. People who were born deaf in most Native American tribes were not understood or treated as distinct from the rest of the community, nor were they likely to experience difficulties communicating with their families and villages. According to historian Kim Neilsen, nearly all Indian language groups had some aspect of signed communication, many of which were shared between tribes or nations. Studies now should that signed language exists or existed in at least forty different linguistic groups in the Americas. The most common signed language was Plains Indian Sign Language, or PISL. The use of Plains Indian sign ranged from the Saskatechewan River in the north to the Rio Grande in the south. This language was incredibly useful because it allowed for communication between tribes that spoke linguistically distinct dialects or languages, facilitating trade in this huge area in the heart of North America. The primary use of Plains Indian sign was to facilitate communication between groups, but it was also of course also used by deaf Indians, meaning that they never experienced a time when they couldn’t communicate with family, friends, and community. Anyone who lost their hearing over time, due to illness or old age, also transitioned to primarily using sign without losing the ability to communicate. They didn’t experience isolation or stigma because of their deafness.

Sarah: Sign language, although a different kind, was also used dating back to sometime around 1700 on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, on the coast of Massachusetts. Jonathan Lambert, a deaf man, was born a few miles north in Cape Cod, in 1657. Later, he moved to Martha’s Vineyard along with his seven children, two of whom were likely also deaf. According to historian Nora Ellen Groce, there were several other early settlers of Martha’s Vineyard who, like the Lamberts, carried a genetic predisposition for congenital deafness. (Side note, Groce actually dug even deeper and found that all of these families came from a Puritan community in the same region of Kent, England, which may also explain why several families all shared this trait!) Over the ensuing decades, these families produced a few deaf children from generation to generation. Because Martha’s Vineyard was an island, this lead to the creation of a relatively isolated society with a very significant population of deaf people living alongside hearing people. The result was that virtually the entire population of Martha’s Vineyard was bilingual in both English and a form of sign language that came to be known as Martha’s Vineyard Sign Langauge, likely a dialect of a sign language used in the Kent region of England, called Old Kent Sign Language. Most Islanders learned sign language as children informally – there were no classes and no formal instruction – and used it interchangeably in their daily lives; the result of this, not unlike Plains Indian Sign Language, was that deafness was not understood as a disability, but rather a simple human difference, like being really tall or having red hair.

Averill : Outside of Martha’s Vineyard, sign language, if it existed at all in the United States, was ad hoc and typically mostly what linguists call “home sign,” a form of improvised sign that often develops within families when a member is deaf. Because there was no formalized language instruction, before the early nineteenth century, there were very few options for deaf children to get an education. Most deaf children stayed home with their families, communicating with home sign or developing their own communication style, which meant that they often could not communicate with people not in their immediate communities. Deaf people were also often isolated, not only because their language options were limited, they were also unlikely to know other deaf people unless they had other deaf family members. Wealthy families did have the option of sending their children to school in Europe. In the late 18th century and early 19th century, most sent their children to Thomas Braidwood’s schools in Scotland and England.

Sarah: Thomas Braidwood was a Scottish tutor who taught writing to the children of the wealthy in his home. In 1760, Braidwood was asked to try teaching the deaf son of a wealth wine-merchant. From this point, Braidwood focused his career on the education of the deaf. Braidwood used a method that combined sign and lipreading/speaking – in other words, a kind of early form of oralism. Most rich Americans sent their deaf children to England. For the most part, this was likely because of the shared language, which made it more straightforward to teach and learn, but many also sent their children to England because they wanted their children to learn to communicate through speech. In the late 18th century, Braidwood was advertising specifically on his school’s ability to teach deaf children to speak. An ad in Scots Magazine in 1767 promised to “undertake to teach anyone of a tolerable genius in the space of about three years to speak and read distinctly.”^[1] This was really attractive to potential clients, mostly wealthy parents, who assumed – like most 18th and 19th c people – that deaf people were mentally deficient and incapable of learning.

Averill : Francis Green, an American sent his son Charles to Braidwood in late 18^th c, was thrilled with his son’s progress in spoken English. After visiting with his son at Braidwood’s school, Francis Green wrote: “On my … visit in Sept 1782, his improvements were very perceptible in speech, the construction of language, and in writing. He had made a good beginning in arithmetic, and surprising progress in the arts of drawing and painting. I found him capable of not only comparing ideas, and drawing inferences, but expressing his sentiments with judgement. On my desiring him to attempt something he though himself unequal to, I set him the example by doing it myself: Upon which, he shook hishis head and with a smile, replied clearly, “You are a man, Sir, I am a boy!” Braidwood wrote to Frances Green again in 1782 about his plans for Charles’s education, saying the boy was excelling in language, math, geography, geometry, science, and drawing. William Bolling, a wealthy Virginian, proudly described his son Thomas, another Braidwood pupil, as having “the manners of the most polished gentleman. His articulation so perfect, that his family and friends and servants understood him in conversation.”^[2] 

Sarah: Students at Braidwood’s school did also use sign and finger spelling. Braidwood’s goal was education over communication style – in other words, he was focused on the student’s overall education more than the method they used to communicate. Several of his students never used oral methods and only used sign, and this was not considered a problem or a impediment. Braidwood ultimately founded two schools, the first in Edinburgh and a second in London (funded by the King!), and his grandson, John Braidwood, took Braidwood’s methods to Virginia, where he opened a short-lived school, the Cobbs School. The Cobbs school was the first school for the deaf in the United States, but it only stayed open for about a year – opening in 1815 and closing in 1816, certainly not long enough to effectively educate anyone.

Averill : While most Americans sent their children to England to be educated by Braidwood, it was the French who were really the innovators when it came to deaf education in the 18^th and 19^th century. The innovation stemmed entirely from one man: a Catholic priest named Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Epée. L’Epée worked closely with the poor in Paris. Sometime in the 1750s, L’Epée met two deaf sisters who spoke in sign language, and became fascinated with this form of communication. He became involved in educating the two girls, but also began to learn sign language from them. To L’Epée, sign language held the key for a sort of universal language, something that might transcend national boundaries to create a global human culture. This was inextricably intertwined with the French Enlightenment: L’Epée saw sign language, used universally, as rationalizing deaf people.

Sarah: Let’s get just a little theoretical and ‘big brain’ for a moment. The addition of deaf education to Enlightenment thinking was a natural fit. The 18th c Enlightenment philosophers (often now called ‘modernists’) were focused on rationality, reality, and shared, objective truth. In other words, there are realities in the world that are objectively, empirically true and this truth must be acknowledged and shared. This is also, roughly, the era of the Scientific Revolution, which required empirical methods to discover scientific truths – you take careful measurements, you observe the natural world, you carefully design scientific experiments in order to learn the way the world around us works. For instance, if scientific study finds that the earth is round, then the objective truth is that the earth is round – you can’t have an alternative reality about the shape of the earth than I do, it’s a scientific reality that we are both bound by. If there’s an objective truth that all must share, then it’s critical that everyone in a community or society is educated in that truth. Indeed, a key aspect of the French Enlightenment was focused on education – for instance, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a key Enlightenment thinker, is still considered an important figure in the history of education. (I had to learn Rousseau’s theories in teacher’s college!) Education was necessary, the French Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau argued, because it helped to ensure that citizens (particularly men) would be capable of rationality, self-governance and ‘civilization.’ Within this system, people who may experience the world differently are problematic. For instance, an autistic person who has a different way of seeing the world is – according to this worldview – is refusing to be, or is incapable of being, rational. A schizophrenic person, who may see or hear things that others don’t, is irrational. And – important for our purposes in this episode – a deaf person, who both does not have the same shared sensory experience of the world and does not share a language with the people around them – is irrational. This is the era that Michel Foucault calls ‘the great confinement,’ when asylums were built to confine and isolate those deemed irrational. For deaf people, education was a means of “rationalizing the irrational,” in a sense. To quote scholars Jan Branson and Don Miller, education rationalized deaf people using “ the rational application of scientific techniques and particularly through teh transformation of their language from its natural, ‘vulgar’ form and content to an approximation of ‘the universal tongue of knowledge and power.”^[3]

Averill : So L’Epée saw in sign language an opportunity to rationalize the irrational sign language developed and used on the streets of Paris. Don’t get me wrong – L’Epée is a really important and celebrated part of the history of deaf education. He wrote The Method of Educating the Deaf and Dumb Confirmed by Long Experience, published in French in 1784 and translated to English in 1801, which revolutionized deaf education. This work influenced the French National Assembly to declare that deaf people had rights under the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and to provide federal funding to de l’Epée’s school for the deaf. But at the same time, these were the philsophic underpinnings of the drive to develop and teach sign language in France. Moreover, they’re the philsophic underpinnings that help to create the schism in deaf education later in the 19th century.

Anyway, back to our story. L’Epée became the first and more strenuous advocate for what became known as the manual method, which, as we mentioned before, means teaching deaf students to communicate with their hands using signed language. With the failure of the Cobbs school, there was a very real need for a school for deaf students in the United States. In the 1810s, a man named Mason Fitch Cogswell decided to take steps to fill this need. Cogswell was a wealthy physician in Connecticut. His daughter, Alice, had lost her hearing when she got meningitis as a baby, and Cogswell was reluctant to send her abroad for an education. Convinced that others were in similar positions, Cogswell convinced the General Association of Congregational Ministers in Connecticut to fund a census of the deaf population of Connecticut, which counted about 84 deaf people in CT in 1812. From this, Cogswell reasoned that there were probably 400 in all of New England. To Cogswell, this was a population that demanded a school.

Sarah: Cogswell then turned to fundraising within his circles with the intention of using the money to send a teacher to Europe to learn from the educators of the deaf there and bring that training back to the United States. Ultimately, Cogswell raised enough cash to send Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, the son of his neighbors, to Europe. Gallaudet was educated at Yale, and had just finished two years at the Andover Theological Seminary, but found himself in a bit of a slump. He’d been offered a couple of different calls to pastor, but he was unwell and declined them all. Instead, Gallaudet ended up staying at home with his parents a lot. During this down time, he became sort of interested in Cogswell’s attempts to teach Alice. According to the lore (Gallaudet University actually refers to this as “the legend”), Gallaudet looked out the window to see that his younger siblings were playing outside, but weren’t interacting with one little girl. The girl turned out to be Alice Cogswell. Gallaudet tried to communicate with her, and the two experimented with talking using finger spelling. While some versions of the story say that Gallaudet introduced finger spelling (sort of on accident) to Alice and wasn’t able to teach her much more because of his lack of understanding of the method, according to historian Rebecca Edwards, Alice was already learning finger spelling and English at a private school in Hartford, Connecticut. Either way, Cogswell saw Gallaudet’s interest and chose him to go to Europe to learn the methods of deaf education.

Averill : Gallaudet first went to learn from the Braidwoods, likely because they were the best well known in the United States. But the Braidwood family was pretty protective of their methods, and agreed to take on Gallaudet as an apprentice at their London school, where he would help to teach penmanship while also being instructed himself in oralist methods for a minimum of three years. But this wasn’t what Gallaudet or Cogswell wanted – they wanted to learn and bring methods back to the US. At the same time, a man named Abbé Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard, a French priest who happened to be one of Abbé le Epée’s star students, was lecturing in London. Sicard was touring Europe giving demonstrations of the manual method with two of his students, including a young man named Laurent Clerc. Gallaudet attended the demonstrations, and after a brief excursion to meet with another teacher in Scotland named Dugald Stewart who also used manual methods, became convinced that it was the manual method – not the Braidwood’s mixed method that emphasized oralism – that needed to come back to the US.

Sarah: Gallaudet studied in France with Sicard until he ran out of money. Gallaudet wasn’t ready to teach on his own, so convinced Lauren Clerc – Sicard’s deaf student and apprentice – to accompany him back to New England, where they would start a school in Connecticut. This might seem like a huge request for Clerc (relocate to a foreign country where NO ONE speaks EITHER of your two languages and start a school from scratch!) but Clerc leaped at the proposition – he was a young man eager to forge out on his own, especially eager to establish himself as a teacher in his own right. (I love this – Gallaudet and Clerc were almost the same age. I see this as two young men full of a desire to change the world with their teaching methods!) Sicard was very sad to see Clerc go, writing: “Clerc carries with him the regrets of his pupils and of the whole establishment. He was its glory and honour, but everything yields to the good he will accomplish, In order to console myself for his departure, I love to think of him as the apostle of the Deaf Mutes of the New World.”^[4] Gallaudet and Clerc returned to Connecticut, and after a brief tour trying to raise some cash, the partners founded The American School for the Deaf in Hartford, CT in 1817.  

Averill : Clerc, and the school he helped to found, was always very progressive, even when Gallaudet had to work to catch up. The American School was unusual in that it had both hearing and deaf teachers over its first 25 years, including Laurent Clerc, who was the first deaf teacher of the deaf in United States history. This was not a given in deaf education – at most of the schools in Europe, deaf people were students, but not teachers because the assumption was that to learn to communicate, deaf people needed to learn from hearing folks. But Clerc was insistent in his teaching at the American school that deaf people were equal to hearing people in all ways. Most people assumed that deaf people were inherently simple and unhappy – in other words, they believed that deaf people were lacking, that there was a baseline way to exist (hearing) and that to be deaf was to be missing or lacking something (without hearing). But Clerc rejected this interpretation, writing (and TW for out of date language): “He who never had anything has never lost anything; and he who never lost anything has no loss to regret. Consequently, the deaf and dumb who have never spoken have never lost either hearing or speech, and therefore cannot lament either the one or the other. And he who has nothing to lament cannot be unhappy; consequently, the deaf and dumb are not unhappy. Besides, it is a great consolation for them to be able to replace hearing by writing and speech by signs.”

Sarah: Clerc and Gallaudet worked well together, and the American School was immediately successful. However, in 1819, the two had a falling out when Clerc fell in love with and married a deaf former student of the American School, Eliza Boardman. Gallaudet’s first reaction was to state that this was an inappropriate pairing because deaf people should not (according to him, and according to most general public belief) marry one another because it was likely to result in deaf children. This was a bad take, not only because Clerc and Boardman had six hearing children, but also because it’s premised on the belief that ultimately, it would be better if there were fewer deaf people in the world and that deafness should be avoided when possible. It positioned hearing people as superior, and argued against a deaf culture independent of hearing people. Clerc, understandably, was pretty pissed at this position, but the two continued to work together at the American School. (As a side note – even Clerc had, earlier in his life, had also believed that deaf people should not intermarry – presumably as his career and deaf cultural awareness developed. Really demonstrates how pervasive these beliefs were.) Before long, Gallaudet came to realize that he was wrong, and their partnership was repaired. In fact, Gallaudet himself married a deaf woman, Sophia Fowler, in 1821. Like Clerc, Gallaudet had many children, all of whom were hearing; also like Clerc, the entire household communicated in sign language.

Averill : Gallaudet, Clerc, and their students at the American School helped to develop what we now know as American Sign Language, adapted from the French sign that Laurent Clerc learned from Abbé Sicard. Teaching the language was of course incredibly powerful, but almost as powerful was the example of Gallaudet and especially Clerc as people. As Sicard had predicted, Clerc became an apostle of sign language, spreading the language but also spreading goodwill for the manual method. As Rebecca Edwards writes, “Clerc’s role in brokering the acceptance of the manual method in the United States cannot be overestimated. He was a far more powerful public symbol than Gallaudet could have been. After all, Gallaudet was hearing, and so he would have to argue for the method’s effectiveness in the abstract. Clerk could simply demonstrate it.” When Clerc gave a public address, people were forced to admit the method’s powerful effectiveness. Clerc was handsome, charismatic, and a persuasive speaker. John Vickery Van Cleve and Barry A. Crouch argue that Clerc was “an exemplary model of what a deaf person could become – educated, industrious, socially skilled.”^[5] Together, Gallaudet and Clerc helped to show American society that deaf people could have lives that exactly replicated those of hearing people, not just because of their work in education, but because of their personal lives as examples.

Sarah: So the manual (sign) method became the dominant way to educate the deaf in the US. The New York School, also called Fanwood, was founded shortly after the American School and adopted American Sign Language in 1833. Both schools eventually used a bilingual method, teaching ASL and English, which allowed students to communicate with each other and also with the rest of American society. In all of his writing and speaking, Gallaudet reinforced that deaf people were not lacking, but had been underserved. While many people tended to believe that deaf people were outsiders, separated from society by their lack of a shared language, Gallaudet framed it as the opposite: deaf people needed to learn written English because hearing people lacked sign. As he wrote in 1811, “This (learning written English) is necessary even for the purposes of their common intercourse with mankind, most of whom know nothing of the manner in which thoughts can be so easily expressed by signs and gestures.”^[6] Further, Gallaudet argued education in sign was a matter of justice for deaf Americans. The deaf people and their familes had paid into public education systems in New England, but had themselves been ignored and isolated. “The hand of justice,” he wrote in 1818, “rather than benevolence, which should extend to their thirsty souls the simple cup of refreshment which they so earnestly crave.”^[7]

Averill : Due to the evangelism of Clerc and Gallaudet, sign became the gold standard of deaf education in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century. But that started to change in the mid century when two other men got involved in deaf education: Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe. Horace Mann was an educational reformer; again, someone who you often have to learn about if you’re a teacher. Mann believed that education was critical to a healthy citizenry – not just in ‘reading, writing, ‘rithmetic,’ but in education in character and discipline. Mann began to believe, then, that sign language was unsophisticated. Language was key to rationality, and an unsophisticated language meant unsophisticated people. He wrote in 1839: “An unscientific language will keep a people unscientific forever. So the knowledge of a people on any subject cannot far exceed the compass of the language which they fully comprehend…language reacts upon the mind which uses it. Men are generally very willing to modify or change their opinions and views while they exist in thought merely, but when once formally expressed, the language chosen often becomes the mould of the opinion. The opinion fills the mould but cannot break it and assume a new form. Thus errs of thought and of life originate in impotence of language.”^[8]  Almost as important, Mann believed that a shared language was essential to the creation of a society – in other words, deaf folks needed to learn English in order to assimilate. According to Mann, “the power of uttering articulate sounds, of speaking as others speak, alone restores him 9a deaf person) to society.”^[9] Sign language, then, kept deaf people as a minority unable to communicate outside of other signers, separated from the rest of civil society.

Sarah: Mann died in 1859, and never actually accomplished much in the way of reforming deaf education. It was Samuel Gridley Howe who took up the mantel and carried it forward. Howe was an abolitionist and reformer (his wife was Julia Ward Howe, the abolitionist who wrote The Battle Hymn of the Republic). Howe and Mann were friends and professional partners in education reform. In 1832, Howe founded a school for the blind known as the Perkins Institution, more commonly called the Perkins school. Howe began his work with the blind believing, like Gallaudet, that blind people were just as capable of learning, no different from the rest of the population. But over time, Howe began to change his mind – as his graduates had trouble finding work, he began to believe that they were actually inferior to seeing people. In 1848, after about 15 years working with blind student, Howe wrote in the Perkins School annual report in all caps: “THE BLIND, AS A CLASS, ARE INFERIOR TO OTHER PERSONS IN MENTAL POWER AND ABILITY.”^[10]

Averill : In 1837, Howe took on a deaf-blind student named Laura Bridgman. Howe’s work with Bridgman predated the more famous education of Helen Keller, but laid the groundwork for the pedagogical method that Anne Sullivan (a friend of Laura Bridgman) would later use with Keller.  Mann & Howe saw Bridgman as a “pedagogical experiment,” an opportunity to test the possibilities of pedagogy. Bridgman was truly a blank slate, to use a theory of those Enlightenment philosophers, meaning that she was completely without knowledge and awareness. Thus, these education reformers could empirically test (according to their perspective, of course) the effectiveness of their pedagogy. Howe taught Bridgman language by putting raised letters on items like spoons, keys, etc, and she learned easily. But Howe didn’t transition easily when Bridgman became a teenager – while she was little, he treated her essentially like a daughter. But in the 1840s, when Howe got married and started to have children and as Bridgman became a teenager, the two began to really clash. (Bridgman also joined the wrong kind of church and ruined his experiment). Howe didn’t respond to this well and essentially abandoned her, leaving her without regular education, relying on whatever teachers the Perkins school could devote to her. As historian Ernest Freeberg described it, “For a decade, Howe had been inspired by a vision of who Laura could become, and now this ideal was contradicted by who she actually was.”^[11]

Sarah: Howe’s disillusionment with blind education affected the way that Howe thought about people with sensory disabilities, including deaf people. Specialized education in places like the Perkins School for the Blind or the American School for the Deaf created ‘clans’ out of blind or deaf people, separated from the rest of civil society by their own mysterious languages. Such “clannish-ness” needed to be prevented and stopped. Howe took this belief with him into his later work in reform In the 1860s, Howe became the chair of the Massachusetts Board of State Charities, which game him the power to shape the future of blind and deaf education. In 1867, the Massachusetts legislature convened a series of hearings to listen to suggestions about a possible school for the deaf. Howe played a central role, invoking Mann’s educational theories and firmly arguing for the necessity of the oralist method. Howe testified that “the whole object of their education is to counteract the effects growing out of their condition. How do we do this? By subjecting them to the ordinary social influences so that they shall escape the effects of their condition. And we hold that undue congregation of these persons involves the unfavorable effects growing out of their infirmity.”^[12] Sign was a threat to this process. Anotehr educator, Gardiner Green Hubbard, testified that “as a general rule, wherever articulation is taught, the use of signs or of the manual alphabet should be entirely discarded.”^[13]

Averill : The goal of deaf education, according to Howe and his supporters, was less to educate the deaf but to render the deaf more like the hearing. As historian Rebecca Edwards put it, “It was the to be the point of deaf education to make “them” more like “us.”^[14] Sign language was a marker of difference and encouraged deaf people to build their own communities and cultures separate from the hearing world. Speech was critical to breaking this process. In his second annual report to the State Board of Charities, Howe explained that “by teaching a mute to articulate, we bring him to closer association with us by using our vernacular in our way, than by teaching him the finger language, which can never become our vernacular.”^[15] Howe saw this as an act of benevolence, a generous intervention intended to ‘save’ deaf people. Oralism was also framed as the best option for those who saw themselves as elite. Hubbard believed that only “a child of a little more than ordinary capacity” could be educated to speak. Hubbard testified to the Massachusetts legislature, “If the child were of poor parents, I should not attempt articulation.” When a legislator asked if he would let the child “grow up in ignorance,” Hubbard responded “No sir. I would send it to Hartford.” (Meaning he would send it to the American School to receive a manual education.)

Sarah: During the hearings, Howe and his supporters also criticized Gallaudet and Clerc’s system as training deaf children for a life they could never really be part of. Deaf children should be trained in labor because, as Howe put it, “they come mostly from a class of people who are accustomed to lbor, they are going back to a class of people who are accustomed of labor.” Children from the American School “can read and write and cipher,” Howe said, “but they have not been trained to do ordinary work as they ought to have been.”^[16] In 1867, Massachusetts made their decision: the Clarke School for the Deaf was founded in Northampton on the principles of oralism. After the 1860s, not only was oralism the dominate pedagogical approach to deaf education, the very way that Americans understood deaf people changed. No longer were they people that required a different pedagogical approach, but now deafness itself was a disability that rendered people isolated and separated from the rest of society. As historian Douglas Baynton put it, “During the early and middle decades of the of the nineteenth century, sign language was a widely used and respected language among educators at schools for the deaf. By the end of the century, it was widely condemned and banished from many classrooms. In short, sign language was compatible with the former construction of deafness but not with the latter.” ^[17]

Averill : By the close of the nineteenth century, sign language was described as un-American. What Howe had described as the “clannish-ness” of signing deaf people, oralists started to describe as “foreign-ness.” In a society increasingly worried about immigration in the late 19th century, oralists saw deaf people as yet another group of cultural and linguistic foreigners who must – like immigrants, or even like Native Americans (as we referenced in the episode about Zitkala Ša episode) – be assimilated. Just like Polish, Italian, or German, sign language wa a foreign language that had no place in American society. To quote from Baynton again: Educators worried that if deaf people ‘are to exercise intelligently the rights of citizenship. Then they must be mad epeople of our language.’ They insisted that “the English language must be made the vernacular of the deaf if they are not to become a class unto themselves – foreigners among their own countrymen.”^[18] Learning English alongside sign was not sufficient. “Sign language is an evil,” wrote an oralist teacher from Pennsylvania in 1892. “English is  a jealous mistress. She brooks no rival. She was born to conquer and to spread all over the world. She has no equal.”^[19]

Sarah: It seems like a fairly natural – if gross – next step that oralists turned to eugenics to bolster their position. The kingpin of this turn was Alexander Graham Bell – yes, that Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. Both Bell’s mother and his wife were deaf, and he spend a significant amount of his working life working on various technologies to aid deaf and hard of hearing people. In his twenties, Bell taught an oralist educational system his father had developed, called the Visible Speech System, which was intended to visually illustrate to deaf people how to move their mouth, tongue, and throat muscles to produce sounds in order to speak. Bell was a huge proponent of eugenics in the late nineteenth century. Eugenics promised that deafness could be, through careful control of intermarriage, eliminated. Sign language fostered the opposite: it encouraged a separate deaf culture, impermeable by those who did not speak sign, which would perpetuate deafness. In 1884, Bell wrote a paper published by the National Academy of Sciences in which he warned that this culture (which he referred to, in true eugenic style, as a “deaf race”)was already underway – that deaf clubs, associations, and specialized publications showed that deaf people understood themselves as a separate culture. There had even been rumblings of deaf intentional communities: Bell pointed out a suggestion from Laurent Clerc that the land owned by the American School be set aside for the creation of a deaf settlement.

Averill :  In this environment, oralists could style themselves as reform or aid workers in the same way that those who worked at Indian schools or settlement houses did – they were doing a service by helping to assimilate the deaf into American culture. Deaf people were inherently ‘peculiar’ by their difference, and sign only exacerbated that. Suffragist and philanthropist Mary Garrett stated at the Congress of Women at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair that learning to speak could ameliorate that peculiarity: it was “solely the result of shutting up deaf children to be educated in sign schools, whence they emerge aliens in their own country!” Sign education, she argued, was a “cruel system of training the deaf differently from the hearing.” With spoken English, the differences between deaf and hearing could be rendered irrelevant and invisible.

Sarah: Further, eugenic oralists cast sign language as evidence of a primitive, savage nature. The late nineteenth century was they hey-day of Social Darwinism, an obsessive ranking of global peoples on a evolutionary ladder, with white people always (of course) at the top rung. Fully evolved people – people who were civilized and ready to be the world’s leaders were not only culturally cohesive, but conducted themselves like civilized people. Spoken language, many eugenic oralists argued, was what separated humans from animals. While manualists had argued that sign was a kind of ‘original language,’ one that humans tended toward naturally and thus one that was endowed by God, eugenic oralists interpreted sign as a form of communication low on the evolutionary ladder. Numerous scholars, including Charles Darwin, understood sign language as used by “savages and deaf-mutes.” Gardinar Hubbard, the man who had testified with Samuel Gridley Howe in Massachusetts for the establishment of an oralist school (who became the president of the Clarke School) later wrote that sign language “resembles the languages of the North American Indian and the Hottentot of South Africa.”^[20] It was unacceptable that white deaf people in the United States appear on the same evolutionary level as Africans and Indians.

Averill : Soon, oralism became the only option for the majority of deaf Americans. In the early 20th century, some states, such as Nebraska, passed laws that mandated oralist-only methods in their schools for the deaf, and prominent schools such as the Virginia School for the Deaf and the New Jersey School for the Deaf switched their curriculum to oralist-only.^[21] The consensus around oralism eventually even got to the Gallaudet family. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet’s son, Edward Miner Gallaudet, had followed his father into deaf education but betrayed many of his father’s core beliefs. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet passed away in 1851, when Edward was just a teenager. Eventually, Edward decided to continue his father’s work in deaf education, and in 1857, moved to Washington, DC to help establish a new school for the deaf called the Columbia Institution. In 1864, Gallaudet got authorization from Congress and Abraham Lincoln to confer college degrees at the Columbia Institution, establishing the first college for the deaf, now renamed Gallaudet University. Edward served as president of the college for 46 years. While he expressed dismay at the death of sign language, Edward agreed that deaf people were at risk of become a separate culture or race, criticizing deaf intermarriage and deaf cultural associations and clubs. While he continued to believe in the usefulness of sign, he conceded to the oralists that sign was a “necessary evil,” to be used only as a tool to move deaf students toward spoken English. With even Gallaudet and his college embracing the oralist imperative, the oralist method became the dominant method of deaf education across the United States.

Sarah: To be clear, many Deaf people pushed back on this. The New York School (Fanwood), continued to teach the manual method, and students from that school tended to be more insistent on the creation and continuation of Deaf culture. For instance, Thomas Fox, a deaf man from New York City, found his time at the Fanwood school revolutionary. Fox attended college at Gallaudet, but then returned to the New York school, where he eventually became principal and editor of the school’s publication, The New York Journal of the Deaf. Throughout his career, Fox advocated for Deaf culture and civil rights. During his tenure as an educator, there was a tremendous push to remove deaf people, particularly deaf men, from the ranks of teachers of the deaf. For example, the Clarke School (the center of oralism) ran a teacher education program that only admitted hearing women, arguing that women, because of their nurturing nature, were better teachers, and that only hearing people were capable of enforcing an oralist education environment. As a deaf man and teacher, Fox defied this trend and used his position to advocate for Deaf culture. He helped petition New York State to transfer deaf schools from the state department of welfare and charity to the department of education, and fiercely defended sign language. Removing sign language entirely from deaf schools, he argued, was cruel: “To the occasional cry for a ‘speech atmosphere’ in schools employing a combined system, we would modestly but emphatically suggest that the suppression of sign langnague in the playrooms and playgrounds of deaf children is a measure of cruelty, opposed to their instincts, inimical to their happiness, and detrimental to their moral and intellectual development.”^[22]

Averill : Other Deaf people used their publications and political advocacy to push back on the push to oralist-only schools. George Veditz wrote about the Nebraska law in a deaf publication, calling it the “Nebraska Iniquity,” which he argued that deaf children would be reduced to “blinking automata wondering why they exist and not fitting in anywhere.”^[23] Even more telling was just how difficult it was to effectively crush sign language, even at oralist schools. Even in Nebraska, children continued to pick up sign language from one another and continue to use it, causing teachers and administrators to work tirelessly to try to stop it and enforce speech. The superintendent of the Nebraska school wrote that “despite these efforts, the pupils insistently use signs in communicating with each other, a condition which is in every ‘combined’ school in the world and which deprives the people of the use of speech outside the schoolroom.” ^[24] When the superintendent of a New Jersey school began to get rid of manul classes, students held a protest and successfully appealed to the state board of education.

Sarah: By the 1930s, oralist only schools and programs did start to decline, though slowly, mostly due to deaf activism. In Georgia in 1939, deaf people advocated for the removal of the state’s oralist superintendent, and replaced him with a graduate of Gallaudet who promised to support a combined method. This change was powerful, but didn’t necessarily mean the end of the battle for deaf culture or civil rights. The mid-century marked a renewed enthusiasm for technologies to ‘help’ deaf people to hear, which ultimately reinforced speech as the preferred mode of communication. But deaf people continued to advocate for deaf spaces and the importance of a Deaf culture, especially influenced in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s by other civil rights movements such as the Civil Rights Movement and Disability Rights Movement. I’d love to come back to this and do an episode on the 1988 “Deaf President Now” protests at Gallaudet University, for instance, which demanded that the university for the deaf also have Deaf leadership.

Bibliography

Baynton, Doug. Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language. University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Burch, Susan. Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II. New York University Press, 2002.

Branson, Jan and Don Miller. Damned for Their Difference: The Cultural Construction of Deaf People As Disabled. Gallaudet University Press, 2002.

Edwards, R.A.R. Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture. New York University Press, 2012.

Van Cleve, John Vickery  and Barry A. Crouch. A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America. Gallaudet University Press, 1989.

Notes

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^[1] Jan Branson and Don Miller, Damned for Their Difference: The Cultural Construction of Deaf People As Disabled (Gallaudet University Press, 2002), 101.

^[2]Branson & Miller, Damned for their Difference, 102.

^[3]Branson & Miller, Damned for their Difference, 106.

^[4] R.A.R. Edwards, Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture (New York University Press, 2012), 21.

^[5] John Vickery Van Cleve and Barry A. Crouch, A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America (Gallaudet University Press, 1989), 37

^[6] Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 31.

^[7] Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 29.

^[8] Edwards, Words Made Flesh 147-148.

^[9] Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 148.

^[10] Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 151.

^[11] Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 152

^[12] Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 193.

^[13] Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 194

^[14] Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 187

^[15] Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 187

^[16] Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 198

^[17] Doug Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 15.

^[18] Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 27.

^[19] Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 28.

^[20] Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 43.

^[21] Susan Burch, Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II (New York University Press, 2002), 26-27.

^[22] Burch, Signs of Resistance, 10.

^[23] Burch, Signs of Resistance, 28

^[24] Burch, Signs of Resistance, 28.