Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader (review)

The history of "mental illness" in America was greatly stimulated by Gerald Grob's 1966 pathbreaking book The State and the Mentally Ill, a history of the Worcester (Massachusetts) State Hospital through World War I. Since then, a thousand flowers have bloomed, extending historical inquiry far beyond monographs on individual institutions. In contrast, the history of mental retardation in the United States is underdeveloped. This is surprising, given the resources expended on the care of individuals historically called retarded, the numbers under care, and the prevalence and power of such concepts as "idiot" and "moron" in our language and culture, both past and present.

This collection significantly remedies that deficiency, both by its own, largely original, contributions and by pointing to future research directions. Each of the five sections, organized roughly chronologically, begins with one or two original documents. The first deals with the nineteenth-century differentiation of care of the poor in almshouses versus the treatment of "idiots" in specialized facilities where they might (in theory, usually failed in the practice) receive specialized training and care. A second piece shows how the "retarded" defined the "normal" nineteenth-century family. The second section has several chapters exploring the emergence of the concept of "the feebleminded" in early twentieth-century American scientific and professional frameworks, including etiological constructs based on eugenics and diagnostic ideas based on the new psychological testing movement. Two chapters even deal with literary representations of the retarded. It is refreshing, after having read chapters discussing the Jukes and the Kallikaks (lines of intergenerational societal problems within families, taken as proof of ideas of inherited degeneracy), to encounter explications of John Steinbeck's Lennie Small and William Faulkner's Snopes family. And it is astonishing, if somewhat ahistorical, to realize that one set was considered "fact" and the other "fiction."

The third section deals with the shameful policies in the first half of the twentieth century of the enforced surgical sterilization and segregation of the now-feared feebleminded. These (like those in other sections) are typically microhistories, and they succeed in placing such policies in their intellectual and social contexts. The infamous 1927 Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell, upholding eugenic sterilization, has still not been overturned.

The fourth section begins with a 1962 Saturday Evening Post piece by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, conveying new attitudes of acceptance and advocacy for the human rights of retarded children, coupled with maternalism and protectionism. Articles here discuss the effectiveness and complexities of the "normalization" of retarded children, now more often in families rather than institutions. Struggles between professionals and families emerge even as community clinics develop their own disappointing alternatives to institutional care.

The final section deals with the aspects of the 2002 Supreme Court decision Atkins v. Virginia, which prevented the execution of the retarded in capital cases. Chapters here also deal with parents' and other advocates' success in closing the infamous Staten Island Willowbrook State School; with compensation in sheltered workshops, as an illustration of a new acceptance of entitled rights; and with a provocative question on how "the retarded" fit into contemporary society.

The editors end an excellent introductory essay with a dozen suggestions for future work. Despite the past two decades of new work in the history of retardation, they note there are still few monographic histories of individual institutions; little treatment of cultural representation; and little written from the perspective of the retarded themselves (and little here either). This wide-ranging volume could serve as a set of readings for an advanced undergraduate, graduate, or professional school course; and it will be of use to professionals in law, psychology, social work, public policy, and special education, as well as to historians working in these areas.