LINKING GENETICS AND DEAFNESS

The Memoir established Bell's initial credentials as a eugenicist. On November 13, 1883, at Yale University, Bell read a version of the Memoir to a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, stating that the principles of domestic animal breeding could be applied to the human race to produce “modifications or varieties of men.” These “modifications” could happen unintentionally, Bell continued, observing that a large percentage of graduates of residential schools for deaf children eventually married other deaf people. If the “laws of heredity that are known to hold in the case of animals also apply to man,” he warned, “the intermarriage of congenital deaf-mutes through a number of successive generations should result in the formation of a deaf variety of the human race.”Footnote ¹⁴

Bell could not prove that heredity was responsible for some or all congenital deafness, but he attempted to show a causal link. He noted that a significant proportion of deaf schoolchildren reported deaf relatives.Footnote ¹⁵ Furthermore, particular surnames recurred within the pupil lists of the American School for the Deaf and the Illinois School for the Deaf: including common names such as Smith, Allen, Brown, Campbell, Davis, and Miller, but also more unusual surnames such as Blizzard, Closson, and Copher. Bell even noted eleven Lovejoys.Footnote ¹⁶ “Such names are by no means common in the community at large,” he stated, “and the inference is irresistible that in many cases the recurrences indicate blood-relationship among the pupils.”Footnote ¹⁷ To strengthen his argument, Bell reviewed school alumni records to suggest that approximately 10 percent of the children of deaf parents were deaf themselves.Footnote ¹⁸ Bell concluded with emphasis, “It is certain that the proportion of deaf-mute offspring born to deaf-mutes is many times greater than the proportion born to the people at large.”Footnote ¹⁹

The Memoir named individual families containing more than one deaf member. The Hoaglands of Kentucky included over twenty deaf persons. Five generations of deaf people were born into the Ouat family of Illinois. The Fullerton family of Hebron, New York, had at least fourteen deaf members, including all six children of deaf parents Sayles Works and Jane Fullerton. Other New England families named Lovejoy, Wakefield, Williamson, Jack, and Rogers had numerous deaf progeny covering at least two generations.Footnote ²⁰

Although Bell was convinced that congenitally deaf partners passed on their condition to the offspring, inheritance patterns were confusing. Not all unions of two deaf people produced deaf progeny; most were, in fact, hearing, and some deaf couples had a mixture of deaf and hearing children. Deaf children were born to families with and without other deaf members in a mosaic that was neither entirely random—for Bell's data indicated that deaf people were more likely to have deaf children than hearing people were—nor entirely comprehensible to Bell (or his contemporaries). Mendelian genetics, the roles of recessive and dominant genes, and a number other complicating factors relating to gene penetrance and time of expression were not understood or accepted at the time of the Memoir. Bell later adopted the challenge of trying to untangle the pattern of hereditary deafness by examining marriage and birth records on the island of Martha's Vineyard, where a high proportion of the islanders were deaf.Footnote ²¹

In 1883, however, Bell put aside his uncertainty about the mechanism of inheritance and concluded that a “deaf variety” of the human race was evolving in America. He demonstrated that between 1840 and 1877, an increasing proportion of deaf people selected deaf partners, rather than hearing individuals, for marriage, thus creating a form of “natural selection.” Furthermore, deaf intermarriage was marked by “continual selection,” and it would therefore increase in proportion from generation to generation as deaf people chose partners of their own kind.Footnote ²² Since the offspring of these marriages were more likely to be deaf than the children of other marriages, a self-perpetuating cycle of deaf births, deaf marriages, and deaf births would ensue.

Bell would not have been subject to such intense criticism a century later if he had left his argument at this point—essentially a reasonable inference from the data he produced and the state of genetic knowledge at the time. Instead, he delved into social commentary and discussed public policies that affected deaf lives, for Bell, the son and husband of deaf women, believed deafness itself to be “calamitous” and the deaf-deaf marriage pattern a “great calamity to the world.”Footnote ²³ He also argued that generations of deaf offspring would weaken American society at a critical period, as increasing numbers of immigrants needed to be integrated in American life. He concluded that there should be a “remedy” to the growth of a deaf variety of the human race within the United States.Footnote ²⁴

Direct interference with deaf marriages, however, was not a suitable “remedy” for both practical and moral reasons. Since states regulated marriage, Bell reasoned that deaf people would move to another jurisdiction to circumvent the laws of a particular locale.Footnote ²⁵ Furthermore, a federal law specifically banning congenitally deaf people from marrying each other would “promote immorality.” Deaf adults interacting socially, mingling with each other rather than with hearing people, would continue their relationships and produce offspring, with or without the benefit of marriage, a distasteful thought to the Victorian Bell.Footnote ²⁶ While believing that deaf intermarriage was a social problem that should be addressed, he nevertheless insisted that “[W]e cannot dictate to men and women whom they shall marry” or “control the marriages of men as we can the breeding of animals.”Footnote ²⁷

Bell presented and then dismissed another repressive option involving societal interference rather than legislative action. He hypothesized that friends could be recruited to halt “undesirable marriages.” Yet Bell insisted that there was “no subject on which a man will so little brook interference as one of this kind where his affections are involved.” Bell concluded that his analysis of repressive measures “renders it doubtful whether legislative interference with the marriage of the deaf would be advisable.” Instead, “the most promising method” to reduce the incidence of genetic deafness would be to “Determine the causes that promote intermarriages among the deaf and dumb; and … remove them.”Footnote ²⁸

Bell was confident that the “immediate cause” was that deaf people preferred their own company, and he discussed at some length the conditions that influenced their social relationship choices—such as deaf-specific organizations and newspapers—and the hearing community's ignorance of everything related to deaf people.Footnote ²⁹ Yet he believed that the most important factors in marriage selection were deaf students' isolation in sign language-using residential schools and deaf adults' use, “as a means of communication, of a language which is different from that of the people.” “Segregation,” he told his audience, “lies at the root of the whole matter; for from this the other causes have themselves been evolved by the operation of the natural law of adaptation to the environment.” The primary focus of “preventive measures,” Bell concluded, “should be the retention of the normal environment during the period of education.”Footnote ³⁰

The remainder of the Memoir criticized contemporary educational practices and reviewed Bell's ideas for reforming them to create a “normal environment.” In 1883 most deaf children were enrolled in residential schools that served states or regions, employed deaf teachers and deaf staff, and conducted academic classes in American Sign Language (ASL).Footnote ³¹ Two decades later, when a more mature Bell reviewed the economic success of deaf Americans, he would suggest the benefits of these same residential institutions.Footnote ³² In 1883, however, he focused on genetics and insisted that the dominant characteristics of American deaf education contributed to intermarriage. Sign language usage particularly bothered him. He reasoned that “deaf-mutes think in the gesture language, and [therefore] English is apt to remain a foreign language.” Bell believed that teaching deaf students by means of a visual language caused them to suffer from poor literacy skills. As a result, they were not able to participate in general cultural activities, such as reading novels or newspapers, because they spoke and thought in gestures.Footnote ³³

The Memoir called for local day schools to replace residential institutions. They would use speech and lip reading for most instruction. Bell claimed, without evidence, that children forced to lip read and to speak would acquire greater English skills than those permitted to communicate in ASL. He urged that deaf children be co-educated with the hearing, what he called “partial coeducation,” and be taught by hearing persons. These steps would save public money, decrease the use of sign language among deaf people, improve their ability to use English, encourage deaf-hearing integration, and accustom deaf children to “the normal conditions of life,” thus reducing the incidence of deaf intermarriage and halting the evolution of a deaf variety of the human race.Footnote ³⁴

Bell presented his arguments as ultimately theoretical, and he deferred further research to scientists, but the Memoir has assumed a central role in Bell's legacy. It did not propose sterilization of deaf people or prohibition of intermarriage among deaf persons, as later commentators have claimed. Bell explicitly opposed laws regulating marriage, and he never mentioned sterilization. Even after he allied with other eugenicists some two decades later, he refused to support or even discuss such a possibility. The act of sterilization “marked” people, and Bell had deaf friends and family. Rather than sterilization or forbidding intermarriage, then, Bell discouraged deaf-deaf marriages and favored deaf-hearing unions such as his own with Mabel. The Memoir was not an innocent or unambiguous document, however. It called for a “remedy” to endogamous deaf marriages, and it attacked the pillars of American deaf culture—deaf social institutions, residential schools, and ASL—as a means to reducing the incidence of deafness. Yet there is scant evidence that it was the influential eugenic manifesto claimed by Bell's critics.

ANTECEDENTS AND REACTIONS

R.A.R. Edwards, in particular, has insisted on the importance of the Memoir in changing attitudes toward deaf Americans' reproductive rights. In Words Made Flesh, she argues that the American public accepted, even “applauded,” deaf intermarriage before Bell's publication. Commentators close to the deaf community, however, had long preceded Bell in claiming heredity a factor in deafness, in calling for actions to weaken deaf social bonds, and in seeking to discourage deaf intermarriage.Footnote ³⁵ William W. Turner, a teacher at the American School for the Deaf and later its principal, wrote in 1847, the year of Bell's birth, that the “question whether deafness is hereditary … has an important bearing upon the propriety of [deaf people] forming matrimonial connections.”Footnote ³⁶ By 1868, Turner had gone further. Employing the very terms “distinct variety” and “human race,” and the example of domestic animals, which Bell would adopt fifteen years later, Turner said that by means of “a careful selection … and by a continued breeding of like with like” a “distinct variety” could be created. “The same course adopted and pursued in the human race would undoubtedly lead to the same result.”Footnote ³⁷ Turner concluded “that every consideration of philanthropy, as well as the interests of congenitally deaf persons themselves, should induce their teachers and friends to urge upon them the impropriety of intermarriage.”Footnote ³⁸

Medical writers also anticipated Bell, often framing their discussion around the issue of consanguinity. Dudley Peet, a New York physician, wrote in 1856 that “some families” showed “a marked predisposition to deafness,” leading Peet to claim that “intermarriage is the most prolific cause of predisposition to deafness.”Footnote ³⁹ Two years later, Louisville physician S. M. Bemiss reported to the American Medical Association “that my researches give me authority to assume that over ten per cent. [sic] of the deaf … are the offspring of kindred parents, or of parents themselves the descendants of blood intermarriage.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Edward Miner Gallaudet, founder and first president of today's Gallaudet University, son of deaf Sophia Fowler Gallaudet and Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, anticipated Bell's arguments by ten years. In a ringing condemnation of deaf intermingling, in 1873 Gallaudet railed against “Everything”—such as newspapers and associations—“that serves to draw class lines about [deaf people]” or create in them a sense of “community.”Footnote ⁴¹ Deaf social gatherings bring “the sexes together” and “induce intermarriage among deaf-mutes, which we are constrained to deprecate in toto.” By contrast, he continued, “we would permit the deaf to marry hearing persons with no other let or hindrance than those existing in the community at large.”Footnote ⁴²

Writing in 1848, social reformer Samuel Gridley Howe, founder of the Perkins Institution for the Blind, linked deaf people with “vagabonds, the criminals, the insane, [and] the blind” as persons whose existence “is a reproach to our civilization, for that existence implies the gross ignorance and open violation of the laws of nature.”Footnote ⁴³ The “subject of the hereditary transmission of diseased tendency,” Howe continued, “is of vast importance.”Footnote ⁴⁴ As Howe wrote in The Causes of Idiocy, first published in 1858, “It may be assumed that in all cases where children are born deformed, or blind, or deaf, or idiotic … the fault lies with the progenitors.”Footnote ⁴⁵ To avoid such transgressions, Howe forbade reunions of Perkins graduates on campus. His son-in-law and successor, Michael Anagnos, went further, attempting a complete gender separation of pupils to prevent “intercommunion or intermarriage.” Anagnos claimed that he and Howe were so successful that from 1870 to 1883, when Bell delivered the Memoir, no marriages of blind couples were recorded in New England.Footnote ⁴⁶

Bell's 1883 paper, therefore, was within a tradition of concern about the hereditary transmission of deafness specifically, and disabilities generally. He also joined a chorus that speculated about society's role in decreasing the number of people born with such conditions. Lack of data made conclusions tentative. Commentators on the etiology of deafness, the role of consanguinity, and the potential effects of deaf intermarriage repeatedly noted the difficulty of collecting accurate evidence to inform their discussions. Bell believed that he was casting the light of scientific rigor—statistical analysis of voluminous data—on these topics. Later pointing out that it was W. W. Turner who first mentioned deaf people as a “distinct variety,” Bell wrote, somewhat disingenuously, that his real contribution to public discussion of deaf marriage was the “statistics of the Memoir,” which, “have never been seriously questioned.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Bell continued his effort to share statistics and suggest their meaning in 1884 with a speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science titled “The Evolution of a Race of Deaf-Mutes in America,” which reiterated the New Haven presentation supplemented by new data on New England families, and the subsequent publication and distribution of the Memoir.Footnote ⁴⁸ Bell printed and mailed copies to all members of Congress, to schools for deaf children throughout the United States, and to others involved in deaf education.

These actions had important consequences. Significant data now affirmed that deaf Americans tended to marry each other and perpetuate a genetic tendency toward deafness. This attracted the attention of contemporary and future eugenicists. Francis Galton wrote in 1885, for example, that the Memoir had a “startling title,” “fully justified by its contents” and predicted that “strong social, and possibly legislative, agencies are sure to become aroused against unions that are likely to have hereditary effects that are harmful to the nation.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Ironically, within a decade Galton himself had become deaf.Footnote ⁵⁰

The Memoir also alarmed the deaf community. Edwin A. Hodgson, the second president of the National Association of the Deaf and influential editor of the national deaf newspaper, the Deaf-Mutes' Journal, was one of the deaf community's most articulate spokespersons. Writing in 1883, he insisted that Bell lacked sufficient knowledge to support his theories, and Hodgson also claimed that Bell's new research was, in fact, old, having been traced in annual school reports.Footnote ⁵¹ Hodgson wrote that it was common for those involved in deaf education to “advise their pupils not to marry others similarly afflicted,” but these attempts failed because of the “sympathy and congeniality of companionship which a common affliction and a common language inspire.”Footnote ⁵² An anonymous writer in Hodgson's Deaf-Mutes' Journal stood Bell on his head, observing that the notion of having a “deaf variety of the human race” was “pleasant,” as it would allow access to communication and ease of comfort for deaf people to be among their peers. The writer conceded that, unfortunately, the realities of such a deaf race appearing were “very dim.”Footnote ⁵³

John W. Swiler, a hearing teacher at the Wisconsin School for the Deaf, was typical in his criticism of Bell's numbers and his concerns. He argued that his institution's data conflicted with Bell's. Swiler noted that, of nearly 700 students in the school's history, only 3 were the offspring of deaf parents, a group far outnumbered by the several hundred hearing children born to deaf couples. Scarlet fever and spinal meningitis caused over half the cases of deafness in Wisconsin, Swiler claimed. He concluded by shifting focus from general societal benefits, Bell's concern in the Memoir, to individual happiness: “[I]f the deaf and dumb enter the marriage relation expecting to find peace and contentment, it should … be with those of somewhat similar condition, in order that a truly happy union of congenial spirits may be formed.”Footnote ⁵⁴

In December 1884, the Washington Star News published a story claiming erroneously that Bell had presented a proposal to Congress to prohibit marriage among deaf people.Footnote ⁵⁵ The deaf press, a collection of periodicals read by deaf people, their relatives, and teachers, circulated the claim.Footnote ⁵⁶ In response, articles, letters, and even a book questioned the validity of Bell's data, his intentions, and his belief that deafness represented a “calamity.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Correspondence with his wife suggests that Bell was not particularly upset by deaf people's criticisms at this time, but he had hoped for a more supportive response from (hearing) American scientists and educators and set out to build his case.Footnote ⁵⁸

MARTHA'S VINEYARD, GENETICS, AND DEAFNESS

Bell followed his 1883 presentation with research on Martha's Vineyard, an isolated island community cited in several mid-century studies of the connection between consanguinity and deafness.Footnote ⁵⁹ Bell and his assistants compiled elaborate genealogical records and searched for meaningful inheritance patterns to determine why certain Vineyard families had deaf children.Footnote ⁶⁰ Bell found that the towns of Chilmark and Tisbury had the highest proportion of deaf islanders. In 1880, for example, 20 of Chilmark's 500 residents were deaf, a ratio of 1 deaf person in 25: 40 times greater than the national average of about 1 in 1,000.Footnote ⁶¹

Still confused by the apparent randomness of deafness in families, however, Bell extended his quest by searching genealogical records in repositories throughout New England, as some of the descendants of the original Vineyard families had moved inland. He discovered that a disproportionate number of Vineyarders' descendants were themselves deaf. Bell told Mabel that he had “unraveled the mysteries of the Lovejoy family,” mentioned in the Memoir, tracing their origins back to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.Footnote ⁶² Bell used the new data in addresses to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1885, 1886, and 1887, attempting to validate the thesis presented in New Haven.Footnote ⁶³

In 1888, after completing his genealogical research on Martha's Vineyard, Bell thought that the discovery of various multigenerational deaf families vindicated his work. “All of the scientific men whom I wrote have endorsed my views regarding the formation of a race of deaf-mutes in America,” he wrote Mabel. “They have backed me with splendid letters. I feel that I am strong in facts and scientific opinions to interpret them.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Still, ignorant of Mendel's discovery of dominant and recessive genes, Bell never developed a theory to account for the inheritance data or reconcile its apparent contradictions—with familial deafness appearing and then disappearing. Despite “progress” reports to the NAS, Bell remained frustrated in his attempt to elucidate the relationship of heredity and deafness.

Bell gained recognition as a deafness expert, meanwhile, even as criticism of his data, methods, and claim that deafness represented a “calamity”—“one of the greatest afflictions than can befall a child,” he said in 1888—reached a crescendo in 1890 and 1891.Footnote ⁶⁵ Over a period of fifteen months, the journal Science published twenty articles related to deafness, many challenging Bell directly.Footnote ⁶⁶ A deaf periodical, The Silent Worker, carried this debate, assuring that deaf people and educators would be involved. Writers to Science and The Silent Worker included Philip Gillett, superintendent of the Illinois School; Edward Miner Gallaudet, president of the National Deaf-Mute College; Job Williams, principal of the American School; W. J. Jenkins, a teacher at the same institution; and Bell. A common rebuttal argued that most deafness was “sporadic,” of unknown cause, and that few deaf people sired deaf children. Williams wrote that graduates of the American School had produced 811 children, of whom only 104 of were born deaf. Williams also insisted that evolutionary “forces” would “keep in check the tendency to any great increase of deafness.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Jenkins added the novel argument that hearing acuity varied in the general population so widely that “deafness” lacked specific meaning.Footnote ⁶⁸ Gillett challenged the notion that it was a disability, terming it merely a “serious inconvenience,” and arguing that interference with deaf people's marriage rights was therefore a “monstrous cruelty.”Footnote ⁶⁹

MARRIAGE ADDRESS TO THE LITERARY SOCIETY

An invitation to the National Deaf-Mute College in 1891 offered a channel for Bell to answer his critics when the college's Literary Society invited Bell to speak on the Kendall Green campus of what today is Gallaudet University.Footnote ⁷⁰ Bell's speech delivered two distinct messages that distilled his beliefs. First, he did not wish to prohibit deaf-deaf marriages:

Second, he hoped to draw deaf Americans away from their cultural creation—the community built around residential schools, intermarriage, and sign language—and steer them toward common, hearing, values. “You are not a race distinct and apart,” he said, “and you must fulfill the duties of life and make your way to honorable positions among hearing and speaking people.”Footnote ⁷¹ “I am sure,” he continued, “that there is no one among the deaf who desires to have his affliction handed down to his children… What you want to know, and what you are interested in, is this: are you yourself liable to have deaf offspring?”Footnote ⁷²

The concluding portion of Bell's talk was guided by his enthusiasm for mixed marriages. “A hearing partner will wed you to the hearing world and be of inestimable value to you in all the relations of life.”

Bell tried to direct his criticism at the deaf community, centered on deaf families, not on the rights of deaf individuals. This distinction ultimately proved untenable.

Bell sought to assure that his words were neither misunderstood nor misreported. Although he could use sign language, he chose to deliver his talk orally, asking college professor Edward Allen Fay to interpret it into sign. He also brought a stenographer with him and would later distribute a printed version of his extemporaneous remarks to preclude them from being taken out of context, particularly by a hostile deaf press.Footnote ⁷⁴

Following the 1891 address and the articles in Science, Bell never again publicly discussed deafness and marriage with two exceptions: a special report for the 1900 census, published in 1906; and a paper, “A Few Thoughts on Eugenics,” delivered to the American Breeders' Association in 1908.Footnote ⁷⁵

E. A. FAY AND MARRIAGES OF THE DEAF IN AMERICA

Bell's studies attracted increasing attention in the late nineteenth century as heredity became a popular explanation for human variety, and reformers called for limits on the reproduction of the “unfit.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Toward this end, public institutions experimented with sterilization. Dr. Isaac Newton Kerlin at the Pennsylvania Training School for Feebleminded Children in 1889 pioneered inmate castration.Footnote ⁷⁷ Other institutions soon followed with castrations and oophorectomies of their own, until, by the end of the 1890s, vasectomies and tubal ligations offered cheaper sterilization procedures.Footnote ⁷⁸

In this milieu, Frederick Howard Wines in 1888 proposed to record deaf marriages, noting whether the partners were adventitiously or congenitally deaf (believed to be a marker for hereditary etiology), and publish them in the International Record of Charities and Corrections. When correspondents suggested the American Annals of the Deaf as a more appropriate venue, Wines asked Fay, the publication's editor, to take over the task in 1889.Footnote ⁷⁹ Thus began the project that became the most thorough study of deaf marriages and heredity ever undertaken, first published serially in the American Annals of the Deaf and later in book form, Marriages of the Deaf in America, by Bell's Volta Bureau.Footnote ⁸⁰ Bell did not participate directly in this six-year study—Fay and his assistants conducted it—however, he underwrote its costs and donated to the project all the data he had collected about deaf marriages.Footnote ⁸¹

Fay's group examined 4,471 marriages, involving over 8,500 individuals in the United States and Canada, obtaining information about the offspring of all but 974 known marriages involving a deaf American or Canadian from 1803 through 1894.Footnote ⁸² Their conclusions neither entirely verified Bell's arguments nor refuted those of his critics. As Bell had surmised, deafness displayed a genetic bias. Nearly 9 percent of children born to couples with one or two deaf parents were likely to be deaf, compared with a general population deaf birth rate of about 1 per 1,000 births. However, a smaller percentage of deaf offspring were born to couples in which both parents were deaf than to deaf-hearing pairs, challenging Bell's advocacy of exogamous marriages. Deaf relatives and parental consanguinity were the most important factors in increasing the tendency toward deaf births.Footnote ⁸³ Finally, divorce data suggested that the unions of two deaf people were three times happier than mixed marriages.Footnote ⁸⁴

Fay's work revealed the complexity of inheritance and therefore weakened the eugenic rationale for repressive measures against deaf people. Nevertheless, it did not alleviate the deaf community's concern about possible eugenic challenges to their reproductive rights or counter growing interest in legal prohibitions on marriage. In 1895 the Connecticut Legislature considered a bill that would have forbidden marriages of people who were deaf, blind, epileptic, or feebleminded, before eliminating the categories “deaf” and “blind” from the final, successful, legislation.Footnote ⁸⁵

EUGENICS

Bell's speech to Gallaudet's students in the spring of 1891 and the subsequent marriage of his deaf former pupil and ward George Sanders to Lucy Swett, a deaf woman from a deaf family, marked a turn in Bell's focus.Footnote ⁸⁶ Thereafter, his public actions promoted speech and day schools for deaf children, and his private research examined cat and sheep genetics. The latter produced material for a 1904 article in Science that attracted the attention of America's most prominent eugenicist, Charles Benedict Davenport.Footnote ⁸⁷ Davenport wrote Bell asking whether he could acquire some of Bell's sheep to determine whether traits are “inherited in accordance with Mendel's law and to study the laws of its variation.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Bell donated a six-nippled ram and two ewes to Davenport's Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York.Footnote ⁸⁹ Davenport told Bell that his gifts had a “moral effect” on the trustees of the Carnegie Institution—financial backers—and influenced the advancement of science.Footnote ⁹⁰ In fact, the sheep experiments led nowhere, but the developing relationship between Bell and Davenport would be important to both men, individuals who shared a positivist belief that the collection of statistics and the use of science could address social issues.

They continued to correspond about genetics generally until 1906 when Bell referenced his just-published contribution to the 1900 Census Report, “The Deaf.”Footnote ⁹¹ Therein he argued that the “prevalence of intermarriage among the deaf and dumb during the latter part of the nineteenth century” had increased the proportion of Americans who were born deaf. “[T]he tendency to deafness among the children of deaf persons,” he wrote, is “more than five and one-half times as great” as among hearing persons, and it was greatest among deaf parents who were related by blood.Footnote ⁹² Bell concluded that the Census report “affords a convincing demonstration of the fact that the laws of heredity which are known to apply to animals also apply to man.”Footnote ⁹³

Yet Bell—an empiricist—would not allow his a priori beliefs to deny what statistics revealed: American residential schools severed the connection between deafness and dependency even while they encouraged intermarriage. People with early onset deafness, those most likely to have attended residential schools and to use sign language, were, Bell wrote, “more self-supporting than the deaf from adult life. This is especially surprising when we consider the fact that the deaf from childhood include practically all of those who are deaf and dumb.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Bell had insisted for over thirty years that speech skills were essential to social and economic success and had worked tirelessly to move deaf education from residential institutions to day schools, but he now wrote that the former “are mainly responsible for the fact that the deaf from childhood no longer constitute a dependent class.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Bell's Census report about deaf marriages and births could be interpreted as fodder for the growing American eugenics movement, except that Bell insisted that educated deaf people, particularly those deaf from birth, were not dependent; and, as Michael Katz has argued, American eugenicists directed their concerns “primarily to the problem of dependence.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Perhaps Bell was looking for a springboard into the American Breeders' Association (ABA) when he alerted Davenport to the Census report. Founded in late 1903 to improve plants and livestock, the ABA in 1906 added a Committee on Eugenics, of which Davenport was the secretary, to “emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Bell was soon named a member, and almost immediately the New York American asked his opinion about deaf marriage. Bell replied ambiguously, “[I]n my opinion marriage is too personal and sacred a relation to be interfered with excepting for the very gravest reasons of public policy.”Footnote ⁹⁸ As this statement foreshadows, Bell's relationship with the eugenics committee would be complicated, fraught with ambivalence and indecision.

Davenport believed that he had found in the popular inventor a useful advocate for his eugenics crusade. He visited Bell's home in January 1907 and reported a “very pleasant evening,” flattering Bell that the conversations were “among the most delightful that I have ever listened to.” Davenport stressed the importance of the eugenics committee within the ABA, which he likened to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.Footnote ⁹⁹ Bell, who lacked earned university degrees, was susceptible to praise from recognized scientists and wished to be accepted as one of them. Nevertheless, one month after his meeting with Davenport, he informed ABA Secretary Willet M. Hayes that he was “withdrawing from any official connection with the matter of eugenics.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Soon, Bell changed his mind. He presented “A Few Thoughts Concerning Eugenics” to the ABA in January of 1908 and showed a shift in his thinking, as he now emphasized civil liberties.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Bell's last public comment on deafness and eugenics urged scientists to oppose legislative interference with marriage in “consideration of the rights possessed by individuals in a free society.” “The moment we propose to interfere with the liberty of marriage,” he insisted, “we tread upon dangerous ground.”Footnote ¹⁰² Where Davenport colorfully asserted the authority of society to “annihilate the hideous serpent of hopelessly vicious protoplasm” to protect the social order, an increasingly circumspect Bell urged the utmost restraint.Footnote ¹⁰³ “Legal prohibition of marriage,” he said, “should only be resorted to in cases where there could be no manner of doubt that the community would suffer as a result of marriage. Where doubt exists the community has no right to interfere with this most sacred and personal of all relations.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Deaf criticism had begun to bother Bell. The 1907 Convention of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) claimed that the ABA's new committee sought to prohibit matrimony among certain populations and appointed J. L. Smith to secure “the omission of the deaf from the list of objectionable classes.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Smith, a deaf teacher, wrote to Bell on January 18, 1908, that laws against deaf marriage would “crush and humiliate and degrade mentally and morally a class of people who have been bravely and cheerfully bearing a handicap through life.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Bell replied on January 20, 1908, that he was not the Eugenics Committee chair, as Smith believed, and added: “I have always deprecated legislative interference with the marriages of the Deaf.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The same day Bell wrote privately to Hayes that he wished to distance himself from the ABA, because “the Deaf of the country are inclined to hold me responsible for any action of any Committee on Eugenics which touches their interest.” Bell continued, “I am particularly anxious now that my name should appear only in a subordinate position” in committee reports.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

As 1908 began, deaf Americans were justifiably concerned that the growing enthusiasm for negative eugenics might abrogate their reproductive rights.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Connecticut passed the first law regulating marriages of the “unfit” in 1896, followed by Kansas in 1903, New Jersey and Ohio in 1904, and Michigan and Indiana in 1905.Footnote ¹¹⁰ A 1907 Indiana law permitted the sterilization of “inmates of state institutions.”Footnote ¹¹¹ New Jersey's broad sterilization law applied to “inmates of state reformatories, [and] charitable and penal institutions.”Footnote ¹¹² The federal government enacted in 1907 a law that prohibited the immigration of persons with mental or physical defects.Footnote ¹¹³ Within a few years, some thirty states had created or amended marriage restrictions; eugenics courses were becoming popular in American colleges; the Mississippi Secretary of State, Joseph W. Power, openly called for the sterilization of deaf males; and University of Wisconsin zoology professor Michael Gruyer, in a popular book, called for the dismissal of concerns about “personal liberty” for “the epileptic, the habitual drunkard or criminal, the gross moral pervert, the congenitally deaf and dumb.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ An alarmed Bell wrote to his son-in-law David Fairchild in 1908 about the existence of “all sorts of strange and fantastic schemes for improving the race by instituting legislative interference with” marriage.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Bell's relationship with organized American eugenics became increasingly paradoxical as he relished attention to his studies of deafness and yet feared their use in punitive and restrictive public policies. In the spring of 1909, Bell supported Davenport's proposal to create subcommittees on various genetic conditions, including “deafmutism,” within the Eugenics Section of the ABA, but he told Davenport that he wanted the groups to examine positive traits, such as longevity, and “excellences as well as defects.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Davenport then offered Bell the chairmanship of the deafness subcommittee, saying that he wanted to find a way to “predict more precisely the proportion of offspring of a particular mating of deaf strains which will be particularly liable to deafness” and “discover a precise law of mating ensuring normal offspring from a parent with hereditary tendency towards ear defect.” Davenport told Bell that he would have the authority to name the other committee members.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Bell accepted this larger role within the formal eugenics movement, but he quickly acted to make certain that the committee would not recommend marriage restrictions.

Bell wrote to Edward Allen Fay to ask for help. Bell pleaded with Fay—a staunch proponent of the deaf community and ASL usage—to join the subcommittee and assist in choosing the other members. “I have felt it my duty to accept [Davenport's request],” he explained, “in order to be sure that no recommendation should be made regarding interference with the marriages of the deaf, that would not be acceptable to those most interested in their welfare.” Bell continued that he knew “that all sorts of cranky and objectionable propositions” would be “sprung upon the Committee.”

Bell concluded by suggesting that the committee could have a positive effect. “I have no doubt,” he wrote Fay, “that recommendations of the Sub-Committee on Deafness may exert great influence. I want it to be influence for good and not for ill.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

When Fay refused these entreaties, Bell even proposed removing himself from the scientific spotlight, a position he had desired for decades, to engage Fay's cooperation. He told Fay that he would be traveling abroad in 1910 and, without Fay's participation, “reports are liable to be made that will be objectionable to the deaf of the country.” To prevent that, “I should be very willing to resign from the committee or serve under you as chairman.” Bell agreed with Fay's suggestion that deaf people be included. “[I] would have no objection to having one or two of the more prominent deaf men of the country on the committee,” Bell wrote.Footnote ¹¹⁹ When Fay again refused to participate himself but suggested possible deaf committee members—James L. Smith and Olof Hanson—Bell responded positively. “Both Mr. Hanson and Mr. Smith … are representative men among the deaf, and I should have no objection to either or both of them on the Committee.” Bell's only caveat was that he needed to confer with Davenport “as to the number of persons to be placed on the Committee.”Footnote ¹²⁰ In May of 1910, just before sailing from the United States, he wrote a final time to Fay, asking him to chair the deafness subcommittee and “nominate the other members.” “You can have me on the committee or off, as you desire;” Bell continued, “but I think that the interests of the Deaf demand that one or both of us should serve.”Footnote ¹²¹ There is no record of Fay's response.

RETREAT AND DENOUEMENT

Davenport published Heredity in Relation to Eugenics in 1911 while Bell was abroad.Footnote ¹²² The first page dismissed arguments related to parental happiness, claiming it had “little eugenic significance.”Footnote ¹²³ Ignoring Bell's 1906 Census report showing that educated deaf people were not a dependent class, Davenport insisted that it was “a reproach to our intelligence” that Americans spend “over 100 million dollars per year” to support defectives, including prisoners, paupers, and the “deaf.”Footnote ¹²⁴ “[T]he first eugenic recommendation clearly is that two deaf mutes should not have children,” Davenport wrote, though he stopped short of advocating legislation to restrict deaf procreation, perhaps because he wanted to remain in favor with Bell for as long as possible.Footnote ¹²⁵

American eugenicists were gaining political traction by 1912. In that year, Davenport succeeded in changing the American Breeders' Association into the American Genetics Association and in renaming the organization's periodical the Journal of Heredity, edited by Paul Popenoe, “an enthusiast for eugenical sterilization.”Footnote ¹²⁶ The First International Eugenics Congress opened in London on July 24. Bell had the ceremonial title of “sponsoring vice president,” as did Winston Churchill and Charles William Eliot. Leonard Darwin presided, and Arthur Balfour gave the opening address.Footnote ¹²⁷ “[T]he most tangible result” of the meeting, a recent study summarized, “was to foster the spread of negative eugenics in Europe and the United States.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Indeed, several American states were debating bills to permit the sterilization of inmates of charitable or penal institutions.Footnote ¹²⁹ Davenport still benefited from Bell's reputation, however, and asked him to chair the Board of Scientific Advisors for the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) because of “your attention to eugenics for a long time and your experience with the Volta Bureau.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Bell agreed.

He was disturbed, however, when the first ERO meeting concentrated exclusively on undesirable traits: feeblemindedness, physical defects, immigrant criminals, and cancer. In an unusually personal communication with Davenport, Bell chided practitioners of negative eugenics and mocked them for engaging in “cacogenics.” He continued,

Davenport met Bell a few months later to reconcile. They agreed that Bell would send the ERO his data about deaf families, and the ERO would pursue longevity studies.Footnote ¹³²

Soon thereafter, Bell published in The Journal of Heredity a plea for American eugenicists to reject negative eugenics. He dismissed the idea of socially determined mating and insisted that individuals must be free to choose their partners. Members of the American Genetics Association could resolve “the disputed questions of human heredity,” but they had to realize that “students of genetics possess the knowledge but not the power” to reach their goals. “[T]he great hope lies in the dissemination of our knowledge among the people at large,” for “no one wishes to have degenerate or defective children.”Footnote ¹³³ Bell now denied the importance of selective mating, which the Memoir had emphasized, and accepted the arguments of his deaf critics:

To “improve the race,” eugenicists ought to promote the “marriages of the desirable with one another.” The “chief object of eugenics” should be to increase “the number and proportion of desirables born in successive generations of the population; and it is to be regretted that the efforts of eugenists have been mainly directed to the diminution of the undesirable class.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Bell concluded that interference with marriages of an “undesirable class” would be counterproductive, for it “would prevent the production of very many more normal children than undesirable children.” He insisted that “the public policy should be: Promote the marriages of the desirable with one another.”Footnote ¹³⁶

The American eugenics movement, however, was turning toward asexualization of the “unfit” as the new goal. Vasectomies and tubal ligations were inexpensive to perform and definitive in their results.Footnote ¹³⁷ Harry H. Laughlin, Davenport's handpicked superintendent of the ERO, said in 1914 that “to purify the breeding stock of the race at all costs is the slogan of eugenics.”Footnote ¹³⁸ Laughlin published a “Model Eugenical Sterilization Law” for states to use to against the “socially inadequate,” including those who were deaf, and Laughlin's ERO supplied publications and “expert” testimony to support sterilization statutes.Footnote ¹³⁹ Within in a decade, twenty-three states had enacted laws to render certain populations barren.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Bell's position on the ERO's Board of Scientific Advisors could not survive this new emphasis for long, and it nearly ended in 1915 when the Hearst papers reported that the ERO hoped fourteen million Americans would be sterilized. Davenport denied the claim, writing to Bell that he was “very sorry” that the “ripples of a very sensational fake article … have disturbed the placid waters about Beinn Bhreagh.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Bell responded from his summer home that it was “a great relief” to learn that the article was false.Footnote ¹⁴² Even though Bell doubted the article's authenticity, the incident drove a wedge between him and Davenport.

Bell wrote to Davenport in early 1916 that he would not be able attend the April ERO board meeting due to unspecified “important matters,” and then he tendered his resignation from the board.Footnote ¹⁴³ Davenport's response to Bell has been lost, but he apparently requested that Bell remain through the next meeting, scheduled for December, for Bell wrote to him that he would preside at the late 1916 meeting “but with the understanding that I will then resign as Chairman of the Board.” And, he added, “I am very much pleased to know from your letter that more attention is now to be paid to the Eugenic positive side than heretofore.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Bell found himself pulled in contrary directions. His views of eugenics and his alliance with various eugenicists conflicted with his personal familiarity with deaf people's humanity. Bell saw deafness as an “illness” but not—unlike many eugenicists—as an “identity.” Unlike many eugenicists, Bell did not believe that it was a condition that should rob people of their individual rights.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Perhaps he no longer believed that he could restrain the more aggressive eugenicists, such as Laughlin, and doubted the sincerity of Davenport's promise to emphasize positive eugenics. He did not communicate with Davenport for the next six months, causing the latter some distress. He had exploited Bell's name in ERO publicity and publications. The inventor's wealth, fame, and influence would be sorely missed. In November of 1916, Bell formally agreed to chair the December 15 ERO board meeting with the caveat that he be allowed to resign.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ After this date, Bell terminated all official duties with the ERO, and had little contact with Davenport or the American Genetics Association for the remainder of his life.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

BELL'S LEGACY

In 1917, C. L. McLaughlin read a paper on deafness and eugenics to an NAD convention, telling his deaf peers that they were fortunate because “eugenicists have not trained big guns upon” them. Scientists believed that deafness could be “controlled through education” and that deaf people “are graded high in the strata of eugenic society.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ McLaughlin did not credit Bell with aiming the “big guns” elsewhere or with awarding them high grades in “eugenic society,” but everyone in his audience would have known that Bell was the “scientist” most directly involved, the only member of the ABA's eugenics subcommittee on deafness, and a prominent expert on all things related to deaf people.

Deaf contemporaries neither wholly rejected nor fully endorsed eugenicists' concerns. McLaughlin recommended that the NAD stand against the intermarriage of congenitally deaf persons. Writer Alice Terry in1918 argued that, although deaf Americans were “educated, self-supporting, tax-paying, responsible … citizens” and had the right to marry as they pleased, couples from deaf families should “refrain from parenthood.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The NAD in 1920 resolved, vaguely, that the organization viewed marriages of those born deaf with “disapproval” and urged their avoidance “if possible.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ In 1930, the NAD declared only that deafness was “something of a handicap to success” and “resolved to commend and encourage efforts … to discover and cure causes of deafness.”Footnote ¹⁵¹

Bell, wealthy and famous, was responsible for calling attention to the link between deaf births and deaf marriages in his 1883 Memoir and subsequent publications over the next decade. Yet after his 1900 Census report emphasizing the risks of consanguineous partnerships, Bell never again raised the topic.Footnote ¹⁵² His correspondence with Fay suggests, moreover, that Bell attempted to use his position and influence to defend deaf Americans' marriage and reproductive rights from people such as Davenport and Laughlin.

Bell advocated for improved deaf education throughout his life. In 1888, he told a meeting of superintendents and principals of American deaf schools, “To-day our deaf children grow into self-respecting citizens; they are able to think with us; they read, they write, they speak” because of education.Footnote ¹⁵³ His 1900 Census report concluded that educated deaf Americans were not a dependent class. In 1915, prefiguring the oft-repeated statement of Gallaudet University's first deaf president that “Deaf people can do anything but hear,” Bell wrote, “The only natural defect in the deaf child is his inability to hear.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ He ultimately turned his back on eugenicists' biological determinism and argued that deaf people would learn as well as the hearing whenever they had “suitable communication with other minds.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵

This last matter, “suitable communication,” is and has been historically contentious. Deaf contemporaries describe Bell, who learned British fingerspelling on his mother's knee and taught briefly at the American School, as a capable user of signs. Unlike most opponents of ASL then and now, he understood its educational power and its liberating role. He was aware that most deaf people saw (and see) sign language as indispensable, as their most significant achievement and most valuable contribution to human culture. He nevertheless vigorously opposed signing in schools, traveling around the world speaking against it, and using his financial resources and public position to support oral methods, for Bell uncritically accepted the belief that the only path to equality for deaf people was to reduce their “difference” from the hearing majority.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

Bell's acceptance of the common view of deafness as a tragedy, and as a “defect” that a progressive society ought to remedy, has influenced historical memory and overshadowed his actual words and deeds. It explains at least in part his continued vilification in deaf community literature. His Memoir was alarming to contemporaries, and its suggestion that social policies might legitimately determine individual reproductive rights—even with the caveats Bell noted—is horrifying in a post-Holocaust era. Yet Bell ultimately changed his views as American eugenics turned increasingly negative and punitive, and he acted in ways that indicate he was trying to protect the deaf community, though from a situation he helped create. Perhaps what Sue Mitchell meant in 1971 is that meaningful interpretation of deaf people's history, disability history, and American history requires a more nuanced, more complex exploration of difference, and the way changes through time have caused us to reinterpret its meaning and relevance.