1910’s

This decade marked the height of the eugenics movement, as well as the birth of rehabilitation programs in America.

Medical experts applied the new (and largely misunderstood) science of genetics to show that people with disabilities were more fertile, convincing many states to pass restrictive marriage and sterilization laws to stop people with disabilities from starting families. The rise of questionable intelligence tests often condemned people to a segregated life in an institution and tied disability to arguments of racial and gender inferiority.

Prominent members of society supported the eugenics movement. Alexander Graham Bell sought the sterilization of the deaf and the Carnegie Foundation funded the Eugenics Record Office, which kept genealogical records and promoted the use of sterilization to eradicate disability in society (their research was used by the Nazis to create a scientific basis/justification for the holocaust, the first victims of which were people with disabilities).

World War I called into questions the practice of separating people with disabilities from social and economic participation. Men with cognitive disabilities served their country by contributing manual labor necessary to the war effort. Also, the large number of disabled veterans retuning from Europe prompted legislators to implement and fund vocational rehabilitation programs. The devastation and brutality of the war also caused Americans to lose their faith and enthusiasm in social reform through eugenics.

1911

• Essayist and social critic Randolph Bourne’s essay “The Handicapped-By One of Them,” is published in the Atlantic. It gives the public an idea of the psychological implications of living with a disability in American society.

1912

• “The Kallikak Family” by Henry H. Goddard was a best-selling book.  Tracing the genealogy of a former patient, Goddard proposed that disability was linked to immorality and alleged that both were tied to genetics. It advanced the agenda of the eugenics movement and used science to tie all forms of social degeneration to disability.
  
  
• “The Threat of the Feeble Minded” (pamphlet) contributed to a climate of hysteria, allowing for massive human rights abuses of people with disabilities, including institutionalization and forced sterilization.

1917

• During World War I, the U.S. Army saw a need for an intelligence test to determine placement. Large numbers of recruits took the tests, the results of which indicated that the average recruit had a mental age of 13.

1918

• The Smith-Sears Veterans Rehabilitation Act provided for the promotion of vocational rehabilitation and return to civil employment of disabled persons discharged from U.S. military.
  
  
• Goodwill Industries of Greater Cleveland is established to train and employ people with disabilities and to solicit, repair, and sell donated clothing and household items.

1919

• Edgar Allen, a businessman in Elyria, Ohio, founds the Ohio Society for Crippled Children, now known as Easter Seals.