Cultural Locations of Disability [NOOK Book]

Copyright © 2006 The University of Chicago
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ISBN: 978-0-226-76732-1

Masquerades of Impairment

Charity as a Confidence Game

SURFACE SCIENCES The nineteenth century oversaw a transition from practices of community responsibility for poverty and disability. An increasingly centralized, national economy gave rise to intrusive managerial attitudes toward pauperism and diverse human capacities and appearances. The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had tended to approach human differences from a religious standpoint of the "strong" taking care of the "weak." In contrast, the nineteenth century approached dependency as a disservice to a nation that must invest in its manifest destiny. Jacksonian America provided an important venue for practices founded on physical observation: craniometry, phrenology, palmistry, psychology, and physiognomy (Otter 1999). Each investigative field sought a passage into the intangible interior of human personality through the body as its signifying medium. The psychic constitution of individuals could be accessed through careful scrutiny of anatomy as a mirror to otherwise invisible phenomena. Thus, humanbodies-particularly those marked as "crippled" or "queer" or "deviant"-supported efforts to delineate between deserving and undeserving poor as proper recipients of public and private philanthropic initiatives.

These "sciences of the surface" were based on the belief that external body features functioned as reliable markers by which the identity of a person could be fixed. Embodiment increasingly came to adjudicate a person's social worth. In this respect, U.S. responses to physical, sensory, and cognitive impairments (actual and perceived, functional and aesthetic) changed from a relatively benign formula, the interdependency of human lives in an immediate community, to one of moral judgment practiced in many American communities. Those classified as economically dependent-because they could not participate in rigid social roles without significant revision to modes of work, habitat, and socialization rituals-often became pariahs. Families came to be held culpable for the unpreparedness of their members for vigorous national participation-particularly with respect to employability. Furthermore, charity discourses of this period often held out faulty lifestyles as the source of impairments, finding both families and individuals culpable for manifestations of specific bodily and cognitive anomalies.

While the later science of eugenics deepened the reliance on the body as an external manifestation of malignant psychic structures, this period in American history is the first to introduce disability as disruptive to rationales of national citizenship. Disability precluded one's right to access modes of civic belonging that granted social privileges. Because disability came to be construed as a fully tragic consequence of embodiment gone awry, one that extracted individuals from productive membership in a capitalist economy, people with physical and cognitive differences found themselves controlled by new terms: those of the emergent modern charity concepts of the industrial United States. Disabled people found that their livelihood and integration were no longer perceived as a matter of familial and community responsibility; instead, they were to be officially classified by scientific techniques adopted for producing objectifying taxonomies of the body. Named as members of a deficient population-the legion of the defective, delinquent, nonproductive, and the burdensome-disabled bodies increasingly came to be managed by private organizations as well as state and federal agencies. This process of cultural dislocation marks a critical moment in American approaches to disability and the rise of pervasive bodily detection strategies required for charity oversight as an extension of newly professionalizing medical authority.

DISABILITY AS DEPENDENCY Often individuals with disabilities in need of "public assistance" due to lack of economic opportunity were labeled as "dependent." Like slaves and indentured servants, disabled people occupied roles as vagrants ruled incapable of entering into voluntary contracts of labor as a result of dependency. As Eric Foner argues, this intolerance for dependency was inherited from the previous century: "it was an axiom of eighteenth-century political thought that dependents lacked a will of their own, and thus did not deserve a role in public affairs" (1995, xii). Yet, while many social historians have found the classification of dependency to be peopled in primarily "racial terms" (Foner 1995, xxvii), others have recognized the class of beggars as representing a wider cultural cross-section of labor refugees who were not allowed "into the matrix of contract relations" (Stanley 1998, xiii). In fact, the definition of beggars and other social unfortunates of this time became synonymous with social irresponsibility and willed incapacity, as their presumed unsuitability for labor was a choice rather than a socially conditioned fate: "The beggar was the most conspicuous figure of dependency and, in [nineteenth-century] opinion, the most loathsome-a suspect figure who allegedly thrived on deception rather than work, someone who got something for nothing.... Supposedly, the beggar only pretended to seek work, 'coining his unblushing falsehoods as fast as he can talk,' while violating the divine rule of labor that charity agencies took as their watchword: 'He that will not work, neither shall he eat'" (Stanley 1998, 103). As Michael J. Sandel points out, this analysis of beggars mirrored arguments against the wealthy classes whom Jacksonians referred to as "nonproducers" and as those who benefited most from a market economy but "contributed least" (1996, 154). Such suspicions of purposeful parasitism on the part of beggars show that most laboring people under capitalism were never far from poverty themselves.

The charity industries hailed from an increasingly outdated ethos of paternal relations. The rigors of a market exchange economy had come to dominate the period, and charity struck many people as a social throwback to the days of colonial protectionism and dependency. Charity was fully part of an exchange-based economy; it performed a crucial oversight task by ensuring that those who did not work were not enticed by the "ease of pauperism." One had to give up something to receive social aid, and what one "exchanged" were the liberties that presumably constituted the "inalienable" rights of citizens. Charity stepped in to assure everyone that a life of poverty was simultaneously "deserved" and necessarily untenable.

At the same time, charity reformers of this period advocated laws that removed begging from public view. Rather than indicting an inflexible and unequal system of contract labor, charity officials demanded, with local police and in the courts, the criminalization of individuals reduced to begging. Passage of the 1834 New Poor Law, harsh antivagrancy laws, and "tramp" acts or vagabond laws in cities across the country essentially made it a crime to beg openly in the streets (Stanley 1998, 112-13). Imprisonment, forced labor, and expulsion awaited those arrested for "alms crying." The responsibility for the violation of such statutes was not upon those who gave alms, but rather upon those who made the request. Thus, simply asking for alms became illegal in many parts of the country. In criminalizing begging, the legislatures drew a connection between beggar and criminal. Both, after all, sought to take something for nothing. Thus, they threatened a system of exchange by refusing to comply with one of its foundational premises. The class consternation over "refusals to work" on the part of "sturdy beggars" and the privilege of getting something for nothing on the part of "cripples and other unfortunates" led to the institution of workhouses and other modes of enforced labor originally used in Europe to extract class compliance. Thus, charity in this period was transformed from a matter of paternal relations into a system in which those who received handouts increasingly found themselves punished for their need (Stanley 1998, 135).

Widespread class anxieties over the precariousness of capitalist relations led to the cultivation of an apparatus to anticipate who was likely to become a public "burden." The system relied on methodologies forwarded by "sciences of the surface." Its operations can be seen in the passage of severe immigration restrictions on those with physical or mental impairments; antivagrancy ordinances and "tramp laws" that denied a town's obligation to help those who arrived impoverished from other areas; and "ugly laws" that banned physical "unsightliness" from appearances in public areas. As the ugly laws show, these systems of anticipatory classification were often based on bodily aesthetics rather than literal abilities. Physiognomic practices became a staple of the new "science of alms" and played a key role in an era that judged itself proficient at assessing citizens' worth on the basis of their possession of a full range of normative bodily, sensory, and cognitive capacities. In many cases the exclusion of those with disabilities was based on the desire of manufacturers to employ workers without need for modification of labor conditions.

For those who fell short of this labor expectation, charity organizations assured that "excessive" need could be met with stern disapproval, moral disapprobation, and patronizing religious instruction. At the same time charity also provided a public benefit in recognizing individual contribution as a sign of beneficence, generosity, and commitment to capitalist values of self-reliance. Charity's provision of such an outlet for moralistic example demonstrates what disability historian Paul Longmore defines as the practice of conspicuous contribution: a cultural ritual in which the "economically able" garishly donate in public venues to help disabled people and bolster their own renown (1997, 146). Within these economic rituals, "disability" itself becomes a matter of performative interdependency as disabled bodies are made to appear unduly dependent and donors further solidify their own social value as able benefactors.

Accounts by social historians of the rise of this new U.S. charity system have provided important analyses of this period's practices and attitudes toward charity. Little attention has been paid, however, to the fate of those impoverished as a result of physical and cognitive impairments (congenital or acquired). This is true even among those historians who recognize the class of beggars as a diverse, disenfranchised social constituency. One commentator who did take up a socioeconomic approach to disability and alms-seeking was the mid-nineteenth-century American writer, Herman Melville. For Melville, the cultural obsession with the "sturdy beggar" subjected all alms-seekers to the test of the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor; however, in the case of beggars made unemployable by disability-we guess this would make them "unsturdy beggars"-begging itself was elevated to the level of performance art. Thus, the confidence games that take place aboard the steamship Fidèle in his book The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (published in 1857) depend upon a level of sophisticated deception-even art. Disabled people are recognized as those who must adeptly manipulate suspicious and surly social belief systems about their potential masquerades of incapacity and their parasitism. Nineteenth-century capitalism thus produced disabled people as ever-visible actors on a debasing stage. Their definitive parasitism is both publicly chastened and embraced as a welcome distraction from the inequalities of a newly solidifying, exchange-based economy. Disabled people functioned as a warning of the instability of capitalism and as an assurance to "normal" people that their own situation was better than that of many.

Melville's entrance into debates over impairment and vagrancy hinges on four distinct critiques relevant to the cultural production of disabled bodies during this time: (1) through the conflation of charity solicitations and confidence games as activities that connected economic behavior with moral action; (2) as a critique of charity systems that excluded recipients from robust participation as national citizens; (3) as an exposé of capitalist altruism that markets products and services through opportune references to the alleviation of human suffering; and (4) as narrative device, powerful because of its ability to function as spectacle, and hence available to unmoor concepts of fixed orders and roles. Our opening analysis focuses on the first of these critiques, exposing the inequitable power relations at work in nineteenth-century U.S. capitalism. Melville's representation of disabled bodies in The Confidence-Man serves as a basis for delineating an economics of anatomy, charity, and social role already operating in this period; the attendant cultural displacement that accompanied stigmatized biological differences offers a stepping-stone to the cultural location of disability in nineteenth-century U.S. culture.

DISABILITY AND THE MATERIALITY OF THE SIGN

The Confidence-Man wages warfare on "sciences of the surface" for presuming, on behalf of scientific and national knowledge, the reliability of bodily appearance as a means to evaluate the social worth of persons. In doing so, Melville's narrative returns to a critique of the cultural practices that the narrating Ishmael had dismissed in Moby-Dick as "semi-sciences" and "passing fables," in order to interrogate the use of assessments of physicality in making moral appraisals and economic decisions. Melville takes up these critiques of visual assessment practices to foreground the deceptions of bodies, and to evaluate capitalist charity exchanges that not only support, but also produce, socially inequitable bodies.

The Confidence-Man interrogates scientific and charity efforts to make disability function as a reliable sign of human depravity. This strategy of remarking on human "grotesqueries" was relatively new in the period, for never before had disability achieved the full status of a discernible "needy" constituency in the United States. In his 1848 report to the Massachusetts legislature on the newly minted condition of "idiocy," Samuel Gridley Howe, then director of what would become the Perkins Institute for the Blind, petitioned for an endowment that would allow the establishment of the first training school in the United States on behalf of "idiots." Following the practices of Itard and Séguin that he witnessed in France, Howe defined "idiocy" as a diagnostic classification of "sufferers ... found in a degree of physical deterioration, and of mental and moral darkness" (Howe 1848, 29). Such embodied conditions identify a new industry of disability, one that promotes the necessity of undertaking research on a previously neglected population for "[e]vils cannot be grappled with, and overcome, unless their nature and extent are fully known" (Howe 1848, 29).

Within this scenario legislatures should give researchers the funding (a form of scientific charity) to compile empirical evidence on various aspects of "bodily organization" that will inevitably come to be recognized in the future as the root cause of human deficiency:

The whole subject of idiocy is new. Science has not yet thrown her certain light upon its remote, or even its proximate causes. There is little doubt, however, that they are to be found in the CONDITION OF THE BODILY ORGANIZATION. The size and shape of the head, therefore; the proportionate development of its different parts; the condition of the nervous system; the temperament; the activity of the various functions; the development of the great cavities;-the chest and abdomen; the stature,-the weight,-every peculiarity, in short, that can be noted in a great number of individuals, may be valuable to future observers. We contribute our own observations to the store of facts, out of which science may, by and by, deduce general laws. If any bodily peculiarities, however minute, always accompany peculiar mental conditions, they become important; they are the finger-marks of the Creator, by which we learn to read his works. (Howe 1848, 31)

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from CULTURAL LOCATIONS OF DISABILITY by SHARON L. SNYDER DAVID T. MITCHELL Copyright © 2006 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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