Content provided in partnership with

Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900-1940. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1997 by Edward Berkowitz

When historians use archival evidence to study institutions, they often find that people start the institutions with mixed motives and achieve mixed results. That, in essence, is what the seminal work of Gerald Grob tells us about mental hospitals, and that is what this book, written in the spirit of Grob's pioneering work, tells us about institutions for people with mental retardation. After one looks at the twisting details of each of the institutions, it becomes difficult to apply simple labels like "humanitarian" or "social control" to describe what goes on inside the institution's walls. Steven Noll astutely puts humanitarian and social control at either end of a continuum and observes the action that takes place in between.

Most Popular Articles in Reference: The importance of understanding organizational culture; Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students; What factors attract foreign direct investment?; Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...; How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques; More »

Noll excels at describing the contradictory pressures on institutions for the mentally retarded. These organizations were expected to control deviant behavior among the feeble-minded, as one might expect from an institution with close ties to the local courts. These same institutions were also expected to train the mildly retarded - the so-called "moron" category - to lead productive lives. Cure and care inevitably clashed.

Noll makes another solid contribution in the way he handles the issues of race and gender. Were blacks institutionalized more often than whites as a means of controlling potentially menacing behavior? The answer, Noll points out, is no. Institutional care was perceived as a social welfare perquisite, not as a form of punishment. Long waiting lists existed at nearly all of the southern institutions. In such a situation, blacks were more often neglected than punished. The institutions for the mentally retarded did not form the leading edge of southern segregation. Were women with mental retardation perceived of as more of threat to society than men? The answer, Noll asserts, is yes. Women were potential breeders, and contemporaries believed that mental retardation was a highly inheritable condition. Hence, women were candidates for sterilization, a practice seldom visited upon men.

Beyond these key contributions, Noll tells a story in which he examines the "important question of why, at a particular period of time, ten southern states suddenly discovered the problem of the feeble-minded and attempted to alleviate it with an institutional solution." (p. 8) He tells this story by looking at nearly all of the archival evidence bearing on institutions for the mentally retarded in the South between 1900-1940. He finds that northern institutions such as the Russell Sage Foundation fostered the notion that the problem of mental retardation deserved a state response. States should build institutions. Hence, southern states erected such institutions, as many as ten between 1914 and 1923, as a means of emulating elite, northern values. The poorest states in the nation, the southern states inevitably lagged behind the rest of the country in terms of both the quality and quantity of the care provided.

Although Noll's descriptions of life inside the institutions and the authority that ordinary employees had over the inmates are fascinating, the book has a fiat quality. It is relentlessly monographic because Noll refuses to shape his evidence into a contrived narrative. Instead, he simply dishes out the evidence, one note card after another. The text is not even broken up with sub-headings. The result is a book that is not easy to read, in part because there is no plot to follow and in part because Noll insists on advancing his narrative by quotation. The style of presentation makes for a short and dense book.

One should not look for a grand theory of social welfare policy here, nor does this book cover the history of people with mental retardation. Instead, it limits itself to institutions, to a particular region, and to a particular time period. Limited in scope, the book nonetheless provides a reliable look at an important social welfare institution, and that is no small achievement.

Edward Berkowitz George Washington University

Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900-1940. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1997 by Edward Berkowitz

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Home & Garden

Most Popular Articles in Reference

Most Popular Publications in Reference