Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900-1940 (review)

To understand the dismal failure of Southern institutions for the feebleminded in the interwar years, the subject of Steven Noll’s new book, one might well begin by noting why Southern racial segregation was such a smashing (if equally dismal) success. One would then discover that the qualities underlying legalized racial bigotry (which the South had in abundance)—an ignorant populace, fear and hatred of human difference, a weak economy plus aversion to social spending—were the very qualities dooming effective care for the feebleminded. Success in that sphere demanded large public funding, educated and supportive citizens, and a broad willingness to view the impaired, not as deviants to be locked away, but as incompetents needing help. It is this dichotomy, according to Noll, that lies at the core of institutional failure.

Created mostly in the post-World War I years, after Army psychologists had labeled 50 percent of Dixie males as imbeciles, Southern asylums for the feebleminded never had a clear mission. In fact, they had to serve two, conflicting functions: On the one hand, Southern progressives, police, and judges saw them as a means of protecting society from its deviants, who also were commonly seen as higher-level feebleminded. Asylum leaders and their medical staffs, by contrast, viewed their facilities as havens for incompetents who, after special schooling, would be returned to the community. Pushed eventually to admit unruly deviants, offer vocational training, and care for more and more low-level idiots—but never given enough money to carry out any of these conflicting tasks—harried superintendents could only watch as institutions conceived in hope devolved into custodial pens for society’s cast-offs and miscreants.

But the book is more than just an account of institutional failure and a reminder that expert plans are always subject to the shaping (and distortion) of popular values. It also touches such subjects as eugenic sterilization in the South (where Noll sees more activity than does Edward Larson’s Sex, Race, and Science [1995]), institutional bias against women (who were sterilized far more often than males), and the care of feebleminded blacks (there was little, but the good news was that as a result they were less often sterilized).

Noll’s monograph is a useful, well-written contribution to a growing literature on the history of Southern welfare. My major complaint is that while he talks much about how Southern superintendents mistakenly modeled their institutions on Northern facilities, he never makes clear just what the mismodeling was—unless it was their misguided hope of getting the kind of funding their Northern colleagues enjoyed.