The Multiple Meanings of Work
Inmates at the Newark asylum experienced their labor as more than just drudgery. Work offered a source of entertainment—or at least a means of passing free time—within a bleak institution. In the early 1890s, the institution was not merely bleak, but also a place of abuse. In 1893, the State Board of Charities discovered that Superintendent Willett, Matron Kate Rose Willett, and the assistant matrons had all beaten inmates. The most notable cases were two ill women, one of whom was beaten in bed when she refused to take her medication; the other "being an invalid, was brought to the matron, with the medical advice that the patient was sick, to which advice the matron replied in substance that she knew better and that the patient was only ugly; whereupon the matron punished the patient with the ferule. This patient was, within one or two days, confined to the bed with meningitis and not recovering died in about ten days." In addition, "the superintendent practiced an unique form of punishment upon the patients, by tripping them from behind and letting them fall on their backs.. .it is conceded that there was never any means used to graduate the fall or force of contact with the ground, in such cases of tripping and falling, except such species of garroting or pressure on the throat or neck." Superintendent Willett, Matron Willett, and the first assistant matron quickly resigned and were replaced by Charles W. Winspear and his wife, Gertrude, as the superintendent and matron, respectively. " Vocational training classes helped fill the hours when "higher-grade" inmates were not laboring in the kitchen, laundry, or sewing rooms, or helping on the wards. Inmates' labors even enabled some to earn pocket money and limited choice over their clothing.
Early on, in particular, work offered inmates an escape from the boredom at an institution that, during its first fifteen years, had no pictures on the walls, no outdoor exercise, and no regular parties or other forms of amusements. Superintendents periodically closed the school—which taught primarily vocational subjects—because of a lack of space and teachers. During the first fifteen years, conditions at the asylum can be described as poor at best. Rafter notes that Newark town leaders offered
Wilbur their "uninhabited religious academy, rent-free, if the state would refurbish the building. In haste to lease what he thought would be temporary quarters, Wilbur disregarded the site's small size and inadequate water operations." Despite serving previously as the Wayne and Ontario Collegiate Institute (a Baptist school) and Lutheran academy, the building was still incomplete when the asylum opened in 1878. The water supply and sewage provisions remained inadequate at the Newark asylum until the early 1910s, when the state finally built a sewage disposal plant. The poor sanitary conditions likely contributed to high rates of disease; in 1889, the asylum reported 69 cases of cholera morbus. Even after the staff established weekly public entertainments in 1892, in which inmates demonstrated their talents at music, dancing, dumbbell exercises, and marching, along with evening amusements twice a month and winter sleigh-rides (two each for all inmates), inmates had considerable free time. Upon his arrival as superintendent in 1893, Winspear revitalized the asylum's school. He deemed only 8 to 10 percent of inmates capable of benefiting from classes in 1907, which they attended in a hall with no desks. Winspear did, however, provide inmates with more amusements. He also encouraged inmates to plan their own masquerade balls and arranged for concerts, cinematograph showings, picnics, performances by showmen, along with seasonal entertainments. After Winspear's departure in 1909, the school closed once again and entertainments declined dramatically. In 1911, the State Board of Charities ordered Winspear's replacement, superintendent Dr. Ethan A. Nevin, to provide the inmates with more entertainment. Among other innovations, Nevin hired a physical director who taught games and folk dancing, among other activities, to 240 of the nearly 800 inmates at the asylum. In addition, the managers began reading to a large group of inmates on a weekly basis, and cottage residents (who generally had multiple disabilities and were classed as fully or somewhat helpless) began having regular picnics outside, among other innovations—likely their only source of outside excursions or exercise. Fifty inmates also formed a Mutual Improvement Society with encouragement from administrators. Despite the growing number of activities within the institution, inmates remained isolated from the outside world. The Newark asylum's "Circular of Information" for 1911 revealed that inmates were only allowed to write home once a month; friends and relatives of inmates were urged to not write anything that might make inmates "discontented."
Inmates demonstrated their boredom in the early 1910s, when they eagerly responded to the efforts of superintendent Dr. Ethan A. Nevin to expand industrial training beyond their usual responsibilities of doing laundry, sewing, cooking, and caring for less capable inmates. After consulting with industrial teachers at other state institutions, Nevin arranged for voluntary classes in basketry, art, and a wide range of fancy work (embroidery, crocheting, lace making, among other skills), as well as daily gardening parties. All of the classes filled immediately; many inmates added their names to waiting lists. In at least one case, Nevin's efforts to engage his inmates succeeded admirably: the board reported in 1912 that "a deaf and dumb girl" who was "very discontented and unhappy but since being employed in basket making and other industrial enterprises of the Institution has seemed entirely satisfied." By September 1913, Nevin had placed all but 18 inmates in work or vocational training (out of a total of nearly 800), a statistic which undoubtedly pleased the State Board of Charities and the legislature.
Inmates' work also offered a means of earning money, and in particular, gaining some choice over the standard issue (and inadequate) clothing—as revealed in the investigation that ended Winspear's reign as superintendent. In early 1907, the Inspector of State Charitable Institutions, Henry M. Lechtrecker, discovered that several board members and the matron were paying inmates a pittance to do "fine linen" and "open linen work," and then selling inmates' work in town for a considerable price or keeping the fancy work for personal use. Lechtrecker reported that the inmates appeared to be working constantly on "dining room sets and pieces for dresser decoration [that] were of the most intricate and difficult kind of drawn linen work, even in the "uncertain light of the early evening, much to the injury of eyesight." By early 1908, the resulting scandal had brought down the matron and seven of the nine members of the board—including Edwin K. Burnham, a leading local businessman and former state representative who had played the central role in the town's fight to keep the asylum in Newark in the 1880s. Superintendent Charles Winspear's reputation was irrevocably tarnished, and he resigned in 1909. During the contentious and several months of investigation, Inspector Lechtrecker and State Board of Charities focused primarily on the "doubtful propriety" of the board members and matron profiting from inmates' labor. Lechtrecker noted that, "My personal observation in the premises is that they feel that they are acting entirely from commendable motives." He also suggested adding rug weaving and mat making since they could not be done in private and "could be better regulated." During the investigation, the board repeatedly contacted the governor to demand safeguards for those testifying in front of Lechtrecker, access to lawyers, and open proceedings. Yet, as Lechtrecker noted, inmates had eagerly sought the opportunity to do fancy work, despite receiving wages below what would have been paid on the open market. Without fail, the inmates used their earnings to buy stockings better than those available at the institution, which Lechtrecker described as made from "inferior grade yarn.... unseasonable, poorly made and without any attempt at sizes."
The question of who should benefit from inmates' labors remained a subject of fervent debate on the asylum's board for several years. Initially, the board arranged for a local merchant to value inmates' fancy work and pay them individually, with inmates allowed to dispose of their income as they wished. In 1909, the two remaining members of the old board (who had both been involved in the 1907 scandal), successfully regained control of the pricing and selling process. By 1911, those board members had resigned, and the matron began depositing the proceeds from selling inmates' fancy work in a general entertainment fund (the same policy as in the early 1890s). The new board also went on record as officially "encouragling all sorts of handiwork within the capacity of the inmates."
From Students to Institutional Producers
Charity officials' fears about hereditary public dependency—and the role of the "feeble-minded" in reproducing public dependency—even led them to reshape life at the educationally-oriented Syracuse asylum. Before his death in 1883, Wilbur had begun to enlarge the asylum's occupational training programs and workshops in order to occupy the growing population of older male students, to whom lawmakers declined to dedicate an institution. As Wilbur's replacement, the State Board of Charities selected a man who shared their concerns about the dangers of hereditary public dependency and, in particular, non-institutionalized feeble-minded women: Dr. James C. Carson. During his long career as superintendent of the Syracuse asylum (1885 to 1912), Carson maintained and even strengthened Wilbur's focus on training students to be self-sufficient. But instead of preparing students to return home to their families as self-sufficient individuals, Carson prepared students to be useful workers in other state institutions, creating a largely closed system. Indeed, 43.6 percent of the pupils that Carson and his successor, O.H. Cobb, listed as "discharged" were, in fact, merely transferred to another state or county institution. Finally, Carson experimented with extending the civic obligation to be self-sufficient to a population that even Wilbur viewed as incapable of becoming producers: children with severe and multiple impairments. Carson's pioneering experiments presaged superintendent Charles Bernstein's efforts in the 1890s and 1900s to turn every last inmate at the Rome State Custodial Asylum for Unteachable Idiots into a producer. Like his colleagues at the Newark asylum, Carson further challenged disabled people's claim to membership in the category of the deserving poor.
Carson replaced nearly all of the academically-oriented classes, such as reading and math, with vocational training. Young girls alternated lessons in ironing with their academic studies "with the view of fitting them in time for useful work in the laundry. A number of boys work[ed] in the tailor shop in the same way." By 1888, moreover, Carson had expanded Syracuse's sewing workshops so significantly that he was able to reduce by a third the annual fees charged to counties for clothing their pupils. He also enlarged the asylum's farm colony which, combined with the garden at the main campus, defrayed the cost of provisions for the entire asylum by an average of 28 percent between 1884 and 1920. After becoming superintendent in 1912, Cobb expanded “manual training” programs even further, adding classes in woodworking, weaving, shoe repairing, machine knitting and, most notably, a canning plant that preserved 10,000 quarts in its first year.
Carson also experimented with training the severely-impaired and multiply disabled pupils whom Wilbur had assumed were incapable of becoming producers. In doing so, Carson helped lay the groundwork for the approach that superintendent Charles Bernstein would adopt at the Rome State Custodial Asylum for Unteachable Idiots in the 1890s. Dismissing received wisdom that children with severe, multiple impairments could not become producers, nor learn to care for themselves, Carson arranged for multiply-disabled pupils to join sewing workshops and learn to braid mats. Carson explained his reasoning in 1885: "These mats are not made neatly enough for the market but answer their purpose very well, and are used about the asylum to good advantage when needed. Their making gives occupation to these boys who could not otherwise be employed, which is the chief object sought." The pupils whom Carson claimed had previously been labeled as unemployable included those who were blind and who had Little's disease (a form of cerebral palsy) or other forms of paralysis. Like many second generation asylum superintendents, Carson claimed that the first generation of superintendents had refused to admit multiply-disabled inmates, so-called low-grade inmates, and children with epilepsy, but that he could admit them and have older, higher-grade inmates care for them. Trent, along with several other historians, suggests that this "open admissions" policy was new and that such a policy became a key part of superintendents' efforts to massively expand their institutions in search of prestige and more political power. While asylums indeed grew rapidly under the second generation of superintendents, Carson's policies were not new. Wilbur had similar policies, and had designed the custodial system in which higher-grade inmates would care for lower-grade inmates. In addition, Carson routinely rejected many epileptic, low-grade, and multiply-disabled inmates, and transferred "unteachable" inmates to the county poorhouses and the Rome asylum. In addition, Carson assigned "low-grade boys" to help grade the grounds, moving thousands of cubic feet of earth. Teachers keep those pupils whom Carson deemed completely unteachable kept busy with games, music, singing, marching, and practicing with apparatus such as the dumbbells, and learning self-care skills. Like both Howe and Wilbur, moreover, Carson stressed the larger social benefits of teaching pupils to care for themselves, even if those skills were the only ones they learned:
If a child who cannot feed or dress itself, button its shoes, comb its own hair, or perform many other of the simple and necessary acts in every-day life, can be taught to do any one of them unaided, something has been gained; the labor of another person more valuable for other purposes has been saved to that extent, and the efforts at training have not been expended in vain.
Carson's strong hereditarian views, his belief in degeneracy theory, and his concerns about public dependency made him particularly reluctant to discharge female pupils. Starting upon his arrival in 1885, Carson began to track the parentage of all applicants, looking for "hereditary taints" such as idiocy, imbecilism, insanity, epilepsy, intemperance, consanguinity, convulsions, general sickliness, physical deformities, delinquency, criminality, and pauperism. By 1911, Carson reported that of 3,000 applications, "but 1,088 or 36 2/3 per cent, came to us from a parentage recorded as free from degeneracy or some hereditary family stain." Carson's research into the family backgrounds of his pupils made him particularly fearful of releasing female students. He contended in 1886: "In fact it is a wise policy to retain all females, if possible, unless they can be provided for in places other than the county poor-houses." In 1898, he added, "With reference to the widespread army of degenerates scattered here and there throughout the land, and who are annually adding to the general plethora of feeblemindedness, we believe that humanity, economy, the protection of society and the prevention of degeneracy demand the permanent sequestration of the entire body of the feeble-minded within our borders in institutions." O. H. Cobb shared Carson's hereditarian views and, like most of his fellow superintendents in the 1910s, saw feeblemindedness— and especially feeble-minded women—as the source of most social problems, especially public dependency. Accordingly, Carson and Cobb discharged female students at considerably lower rates than male students between 1886 and 1920, even though female students made up slightly more of the asylum's population: male students composed 59.46 percent of discharges, while female students made up only 41.17 percent of discharges.
Carson, however, did not bar all male pupils from the community outside the asylum. Willie, for instance, who had arrived at Syracuse in 1851 along with his brother Natty, lived at the asylum until his death in 1898 at age 55. Carson noted, "[Willie] became a constant reader of the Bible, a member of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in this city and a regular, interested and devoted attendant at all of the services in that church. His conscientious Christian life was a most worthy example to those better endowed and won many friends to him in the church, at the Y.M.C.A. and throughout the city. During his last illness these friendships were well attested by the many inquiries about him and the almost daily calls he received." Willie's long tenure at the asylum and cheerful demeanor gave him special privileges, but Carson permitted some male students to wander nearby streets freely. Carson also discharged small numbers of pupils, mostly young men, as self-supporting. One man trained for several years with the asylum's carpenter; after being discharged in 1892, he began working as a carpenter in New York City, where he earned $12 to $14 a week. Another moved to California, where he supported himself by working in a raisin vineyard. Others discharged themselves by "eloping" (or escaping), as in the case of Adolphus Whitman, who left the asylum in 1889 to work as a farm laborer and railroad gripman (and strikebreaker) for several years, among other jobs.
- Sarah Frances Rose, No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1850-1930. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2008. pp. 83-94