Deaf Culture Prevails

Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II by Susan Burch (New York and London: New York University Press, 2002. 240 pp., cloth $38.00)

Gaillard in Deaf America: A Portrait of the Deaf Community, 1917 by Henri Gaillard, ed. Robert Buchanan, trans. William Sayers (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2002. 152 pp., paper $24.95)

In 1917, when a deaf Frenchman named Henri Gaillard toured the eastern United States and Ohio, he discovered a vibrant deaf community, alive with celebratory dinners, social gatherings, athletic clubs, fraternal associations, dances, religious groups, and service organizations. In a report he later wrote for his fellow deaf people in France, Gaillard bemoans the lack of wine in the United States and the inferior quality of American cuisine, but he glowingly describes the nation's deaf culture. He also depicts accomplished deaf individuals and praises the American deaf education system as the most successful in the world. Citing the nation's 157 schools and college for deaf students, which together had educated over 14,000 people, Gaillard challenges his readers, "Name one European country that can claim to have done as much" (29). At another point, after recounting how a hearing girl came up and fingerspelled to him, he observes, "It would seem that in America public education about the deaf is more successful than in France" (51).

Gaillard's upbeat account may surprise people today who are accustomed to thinking of the first half of the twentieth century as a kind of dark ages for deaf Americans, a regressive period when oralism put American Sign Language and deaf culture into retreat.¹ Although this bleak mythos has been persistent, it has never seemed to tell the full story. Deaf people clearly managed to preserve their language and cultural institutions, from local deaf clubs to the National Association of the Deaf, quite well. Even though scholars in deaf studies have devoted relatively little attention to the period between 1900 and 1950, we have gradually gained a better understanding of the time.² Yet despite this progress, original material from the period has remained a bit slim, and most of all we have lacked a compelling historical interpretation that puts the entire era into focus.

Now two important new books help to fill that lacuna. In Signs of Resistance Susan Burch builds on previous scholarship to offer a comprehensive and convincing reading of the period, deftly showing the ways in which deaf Americans preserved their language and culture in the face of pressure to assimilate. Gaillard in Deaf America, edited by Robert Buchanan, is a translation of Gaillard's engaging report on his visit to the United States, which he originally published in French in 1919 as Une Mission de sourds-muèts français aux Etats-Unis (Juillet 1917): Rapport des delegues. This unusual text has apparently been stored and largely forgotten in the Gallaudet University library all these years. For all their differences in form, these two books complement each other exceedingly well. Together they greatly enhance our understanding of a time when deaf Americans endured severe discrimination and strengthened their cultural identity, even while excluding some deaf people from their fold.

Throughout Signs of Resistance, Burch places deaf Americans' experiences during the period in a larger historical context. In particular, she shows how deaf people responded to mainstream society's emphasis on "normality." Early-twentieth-century America pressured marginal groups, including recent immigrants and Native Americans, to blend in and become model citizens. People were often uncomfortable with difference and especially with those who did not speak English. As no less than Theodore Roosevelt put it, "We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language" (11). Such influential views fed into the oralist movement and (as Douglas Baynton has shown) help to explain why some hearing people who were familiar with deaf culture—like Frank Booth, the son of deaf leader Edmund Booth, and Albert Crouter, a fluent signer&#8212...