Free A Disability History of the United States by Kim E. Nielsen

devastation, and some did both.

SIX

THREE GENERATIONS OF IMBECILES ARE ENOUGH
    The Progressive Era, 1890–1927
    In his 1923 State of the Union Address, President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed, “America must be kept American. For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration.” 1 Coolidge was not alone. The mass immigration of southern and eastern Europeans who provided the cheap labor that fueled the nation’s industrial and economic expansion now generated fears about a deteriorating national body, as did the mass migration of African Americans out of the rural South and into the urban North. Since the early twentieth century, a growing wave of concern about the changing nature of the nation’s citizens had overwhelmed the United States, its politics, and its culture. People with disabilities fought against increasingly stringent and harsh laws and cultural attitudes, but despite their efforts the definition of “undesirable” became ever more wide, fluid, and racially/ethnically based. Physical “defects,” both scientists and the casual observer increasingly assumed, went hand in hand with mental and moral “defects.” This resulted in the forced sterilization of more than sixty-five thousand Americans by the 1960s, and in the most restrictive immigration laws in US history (that, among other things, excluded people with disabilities). The ideal American citizen was defined in increasingly narrow and increasingly specific physical terms.
    Many in power—including politicians, educators, religious leaders, and jurists—sought to explain and address the growing social concerns caused by industrialization and urbanization. They used Gregor Mendel’s scientific work on plant genetics and the newly developed Binet-Simon intelligence test to argue that criminality, feeble-mindedness, sexual perversions, and immorality, as well as leadership, responsibility, and proper expressions of gender, were hereditary traits (just as blue eyes were hereditary traits). Conveniently, this argument blamed the huge economic disparities between the small numbers of the rich and the large numbers of the poor on the deficiencies of poor people. While then and still widely discredited by many scientists, the gospel of eugenics was embraced wholeheartedly by many—including biologist Charles Davenport and then Harry Laughlin. Eugenics is the belief that the way to improve society is through better human breeding practices so that only those with “positive” hereditary traits reproduce. In law, in popular culture, in science, and even at local county fairs, eugenics was pervasive in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
    The arguments of Chief Justice Harry Olson of the municipal court of Chicago, who decided the fate of many individuals considered defective, are reflective of popular eugenicists. He warned in 1911 that the success of the United States depended on limiting its undesirable elements—degenerate immigrants being only one of the many undesirable categories. In his 1922 foreword to Harry Laughlin’s treatise on the state of eugenics in the United States, Olson warned that “the success of democracy depends on the quality of its individual elements . . . [If] there is a constant and progressive racial degeneracy, it is only a question of time when popular self-government will be impossible, and will be succeeded by chaos, and finally a dictatorship.” 2
    Given such weighty political importance, judicial officials, physicians, psychiatrists, and others who contributed to and managed insane asylums took their resulting responsibilities seriously. In 1899 Dr. Henry Clay Sharp of the Indiana Reformatory, for example, instituted a sterilization program in order to prevent the spread of hereditary defects among US residents. As he warned in 1909, “There is no longer any questioning of the fact that the degenerate class is increasing out of all proportion to