The Dickensian Disability Movement
In this image: Cover of 1929 annual report of Association for the Aid of Crippled Children, and photo of five-year old boy with leg braces, above a quote from Gov. Franklin Roosevelt stating “the problems of the crippled child must for many years to come rest for solution on private associations and individuals”.
There was an entirely separate and very different disability movement that ran its course more than a century ago.
It was a largely private-sector effort led, as often as not, by elite college educated women whose primary cause was what they called “crippled children.” A mighty wave of organization-building, professional work and advocacy eventually emerged, practically all of which reflected the movement’s elite, private-sector origins. In some respects it was not unlike the way that Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge, in the aftermath of his Christmas-Eve reformation, gave aid to Tiny Tim’s family so that the child “did not die” (as the story puts it). For that reason, I have dubbed it the “Dickensian Disability Movement.”
It began in the 1860s, with a flurry of new entities intended to provide, for the first time in the United States, some level of medical and social support for people with disabilities living in the general population—groups like the New York Society For The Relief Of The Ruptured And Crippled (the ancestor of today’s Hospital For Special Surgery). They appeared in response to a crisis: “throngs,” as one contemporary put it, of poor, homeless, unemployed people with disabilities. Hospitals would not admit them, since they were chronically rather than acutely ill. Unable to find work, they became professional beggars, graphically displaying their ailments to earn their alms. They had to, in order to compete with thousands of other beggars, all hoping for scraps in the physically dismal, filthy City as it then existed.
Through different combinations of health care, education, shelter and what we would now call social work, the organizations of the 1860s managed to push back, to some degree, against these brutal circumstances.
May Darrach (see gallery entry), for one, may have had her life saved by these early groups. She reached adulthood with the talent and drive to catalyze the movement’s next phase—a proliferation of charitable groups, the creation of the first-ever public and private educational programs for children with disabilities. What’s more, once the cause of “crippled children” had become acceptable, thanks to Darrach and others, elites responded in increasingly substantial ways.
The Dickensian movement reached its peak during the 1910’s. Institutions multiplied across the nation. National and professional journals were established. Summer camps appeared, and occupational therapy became a recognized discipline. Ford Motors was hiring people with disabilities. Even Major League Baseball had a share of players with disabilities.
As World War One approached, the Dickensians took a pro-active position, establishing the incredibly active and prolific Red Cross Institute For Crippled And Disabled Men, among other things, to prepare for the expected flood of disabled veterans.
But as the Progressive Era faded during the 1920s, the Dickensian movement sputtered and lost its reforming zeal. It was from this incomplete fabric, out of the ashes of the Dickensian era, that what we now call the medical model emerged—ironically, it’s probably the Dickensians’ most obvious legacy.
Beyond question, the Dickensians produced a leadership, an institutional network, a literature, a base of social work and social policy, that was unprecedented. It is, however, less clear whether these benefactors actually saw people with disabilities as human beings like themselves.
It’s hard to dispute that even impersonal or patronizing support was an advance over begging and dying on the street. Nonetheless, the ties of common humanity between disabled and nondisabled could not advance so long as the disability community remained passive rather than proactive, so long as the Dickensian Disability Movement served as a mirror of the benefactors’ moral goodness rather than as an exercise in self-advocacy by people with disabilities themselves.
The proof of this lies in the fact that over the entire course of the Dickensian Disability Movement—more than half a century—it seems to have produced only a handful of disability activists, people like May Darrach.
During the fifty-year period of the Dickensian Disability Movement, the population of people with disabilities grew, because of improved public health and medical care, because of the Great War, because of increasing rates of industrial injuries, and because of the sudden emergence of polio as a major public health issue. Thanks to the public school programs that May Darrach and others developed, many young people with disabilities received at least some portion of an education. But they hit an almost absolute wall when it came to economic independence and social autonomy. This proved to be an obstacle that would not be successfully attacked for nearly fifty years—by the founders of the modern New York City Disability Rights Movement.
Today’s movement rests on an entirely different foundation. It IS primarily the result of self-advocacy by people with disabilities, and it rests upon a legalistic and publicly funded basis that is quite unlike the elitist, charitable and moralistic foundation of its Dickensian predecessor.
by Warren Shaw
