Gaillard in Deaf America: A Portrait of the Deaf Community 1917

INTRODUCTION

H INTRODUCTION Bob Buchanan Our understanding of the culture, contributions, and history of this nation’s deaf community has grown greatly over the past thirty years. This is due in no small measure to an increasingly varied collection of popular as well as academic works in fiction and nonfiction. Many of these books have chronicled the origins and growth of the deaf community during the late nineteenth century or depicted contemporary issues in areas such as education , the arts, and public life. These efforts have enriched deaf studies, broadened the emerging field of disability history, and helped us better understand the distinctive and common experiences of this country’s diverse communities of citizens.1 Amid these academic and popular advances, however, works by deaf authors that have surveyed the deaf community and American society at large have been extremely uncommon. Gaillard in Deaf America is just such a welcomed exception. In it, Henri Gaillard, a French deaf activist and leader, offers an engaging account of his travels to the United States during the summer of 1917 that is certain to delight and inform readers interested in the deaf community and mainstream society. 1 An adroit writer with a sharp memory, a perceptive eye, and an engaging personality, Gaillard composed an insightful journal that recounts his visit with the American deaf community. For three months, Gaillard, accompanied by French colleagues Jean Olivier, Edmond Pilet, and Eugene Graff, traveled up and down the east coast and into the Midwest.2 They visited schools and colleges, social clubs and conventions, private residences and workplaces, meeting both deaf leaders and ordinary adults. Beginning in Hartford, Gaillard and company traveled to metropolitan New York, Buffalo, Akron, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C., where they were welcomed by their deaf colleagues. Gaillard was more than an astute chronicler of the deaf community ; he was also a perceptive student of American culture and life. Although he was most intent on conveying the ideas and institutions of the deaf community, his account also brims with engaging sketches of the wider world. The careful reader will not help but notice that some of his portrayals, while representative of the early twentieth century, are now understood to be inaccurate , and even troubling. His stereotypical representation of Jews as frugal business leaders comes to mind, as does his frequent depiction of Germans as “Huns.” Beyond these shortcomings , however, Gaillard also deftly draws the reader into the perils and delights of rural and urban life in the formative years of the past century. Whether worrying about the dangers of automobiles that careen about at the dizzying speed of sixty miles per hour, marveling at dazzling new skyscrapers, or decrying the decline of once pristine rivers now darkened by industrial soot, Gaillard remains an accomplished and inviting storyteller. This is his journal. H The impetus for Gaillard’s visit began not in France but the United States. In the fall of 1916, Jay Cook Howard, the eighth president of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD), eagerly invited representatives of the “deaf of France” to journey to Hartford, Connecticut, the following summer to 2 BOB BUCHANAN celebrate the 100th anniversary of the American School for the Deaf (ASD), the first permanent school for deaf students in the United States.3 French and American deaf citizens, Howard understood, shared a common history. In the United States, ASD’s centennial symbolized a century of educational and cultural progress for deaf citizens. In France, deaf citizens took special pride in the advanced status and education of American deaf adults. One century before, France’s brilliant deaf teacher Laurent Clerc, gave up a teaching career in Paris and sailed to the United States, where he assisted the Reverend Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, an eager but inexperienced evangelical, in founding ASD. Over the next forty years, they worked with unparalleled success to establish and expand the impact of the venerable institution. In their efforts, these men advanced forever the standing of America’s deaf citizens.4 France’s Henri Gaillard, the recipient of Howard’s invitation, also understood this vital legacy. Having come of age during France’s Third Republic, with its progressive emphasis on universal suffrage for men and the rights of man, he had worked steadily to advance the position of the country’s marginalized deaf citizens. Born in 1866 and deafened by an explosion at age five, he attended schools for hearing students, later...