Social Welfare History Project Social Welfare Issues Page 11

Franklin Pierce’s 1854 Veto

The legislation advocated by Dorothea Dix — and passed by the House and Senate — was not unprecedented. At a time when there was no federal income tax, public land represented the largest potential financial resource available to the federal government. Federal lands had already been used to promote the construction of railroads, and there were discussions in 1854 of a homestead act that would provide free land to settlers who were willing to move to the West.

Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History

Not only has disability justified the inequality of disabled people but of other groups as well. In the three great citizenship debates of the 19th century and early 20th centuries: women’s suffrage, African American freedom, and immigration restriction, disability played a substantive role.

Alexander Graham Bell and His Role in Oral Education

Written by Brian H. Greenwald, Ph.D., Gallaudet University. “The promise of a more homogeneous society allowed oralism to emerge as the most attractive option to educate deaf people. Such strategies paralleled the general assimilation movement through the supposed uplifting of the deaf community by halting sign language use, reducing the importance of residential schools, and decreasing intermarriage among deaf partners.”

Instruction Of Idiots (1849)

This article written by J. G. W. appeared in a Philadelphia Quaker periodical as efforts to educate children with cognitive disabilities first started in the United States.

Education Of The Blind (1833)

“It has long been to us a matter of surprise that the blind have been so much neglected. Our age, compared with those that have passed away, is truly a humane one; never has more attention been paid to individual man than now; never has the imperative duty of society to provide for the wants of those whom nature or accident has thrown upon its charity, been more deeply felt, or more conscientiously discharged….”

Annual Report Of The Trustees Of The New-England Institution For The Education Of The Blind, 1834

Annual reports to state legislatures were one of the key methods by which trustees and superintendents of schools for disabled children argued for additional government funding. In this report, the trustees of the New-England Institution for the Education of the Blind tried to appeal to legislators’ sympathies by stating that the asylum served primarily poor children, documenting the school’s extensive public support, and describing the ways in which pupils were prepared to support themselves after graduation.

Acts And Resolves Relating To The Institution For The Blind (1870)

A Report from the Thirty-Eighth Annual Report Of The Trustees Of The Perkins Institution And Massachusetts Asylum For The Blind,1870. “These acts and resolves illustrate the changing population and goals of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind during the mid-nineteenth century.”

Sullivan, Anne

Sullivan’s mother died when Anne was about eight years old. Thomas Sullivan found it too difficult to raise a family by himself and soon abandoned his children. Anne and her younger brother Jimmie were sent to live in the “poor house” in Tewksbury.

Conditions at the Tewksbury Almshouse were deplorable. Chronically underfunded, overcrowded and in disrepair, the Almshouse housed an average of 940 men, women and children during the years that Sullivan was there. The mortality rate was very high, and within three months of their arrival, Jimmie Sullivan died. The children had been close, and Sullivan felt the loss deeply.

Perkins School for the Blind

Perkins School for the Blind is located on a 38-acre campus on the Charles River in Watertown, Massachusetts, with partner programs in 65 countries. The school is committed to providing education and services that build productive, meaningful lives for children and adults around the world who are blind or deafblind, including those with additional disabilities.

Bridgman, Laura Dewey

Half a century before Helen Keller, the “Original Helen Keller,” Laura Dewey Bridgman, became the first deaf and blind person to learn a language. By the time that Helen Keller became famous in the early twentieth century, Bridgman’s story had faded and been forgotten — but like Keller, Bridgman moved souls around the world by triumphing over her multiple disabilities.