As a young child in Michigan in the 1880s, polio survivor Blanche Van Leuven Browne often scribbled on a slate, believing she was writing; she then “proudly recited what I had thought as I scribbled” to her parents.Footnote 1 Later in life, she told this story to lay claim to a lifelong love of learning, especially reading and writing. Upon contracting infantile paralysis at age three, however, Browne's formal education was hindered before it began; for the rest of her student career, she undertook her studies haphazardly while in and out of hospitals. The frustrations of this process made her determined to create educational opportunities for other disabled children. In 1907, Browne opened the Van Leuven Browne Hospital-School (VLBHS) explicitly for the care and schooling of physically disabled children in Detroit. By doing so, she hoped not only to care for these children but to prove their worth to a hostile world.
This article argues for the vital role of education in Browne's innovative and controversial mission in advocating for children with disabilities. An academic education focused on writing, citizenship, and individuality took precedence in Browne's work, rather than more standardized efforts at vocational training or surgical cures, which were the predominant approaches of the period.Footnote 2 From the time she opened the school until she departed Detroit in 1918, Browne emphasized writing for her pupil-patients, hoping that they would find personal and financial security the same way that she had: through narrating her life experiences in fiction and nonfiction to sell to or fund-raise from readers. She also encouraged them to undertake self-directed activities through which they could cultivate leadership and citizenship. Browne's educational emphasis redefined what it meant to be a “crippled child” and oriented work for children with disabilities in a different direction than the more medically focused efforts that preceded and would succeed her.
Scholarly treatments of disability and education have tended to concentrate on incorporating disability into educational spaces, taking up such topics as the evolution of special education or health work in public schools, or studying the roots of the disability rights movement in university-level activism.Footnote 3 This is for good reason—these events are legible through policy and documentation as well as relevant to concerns of modern schooling.Footnote 4 Educational inclusion and exclusion also often reflect, as in the case of racial segregation and integration, broader trends of social and political access—schooling, like housing, transit, or recreation, is a public arena in which contests of identity and oppression play out.Footnote 5
In reversing this common inquiry, my focus centers on how schooling fit in with turn-of-the-century self-conceptualizations of disability. I argue here that the role of writing and education in Browne's institution was in stark contrast to the medical and vocational efforts that dominated the period and worked to associate physical disability with intellectual achievement. A study of Browne's tenets of disabled education adds to a historiographical consideration of the role of education in movements for social change. Historian John L. Rury suggests that education has served as a tool for changing society in a diverse array of arenas throughout US history. These efforts include those designed to overthrow existing systems of subjugation, such as institutions organized by African Americans in the post-Civil War period, as well as those which were themselves oppressive, as in nineteenth- and twentieth-century uses of schooling to force Indigenous children to assimilate. These efforts did not always achieve their goals—of all the groups purporting to change their social status through education, middle- and upper-class White women were the most successful.Footnote 6 Like other education reformers and rights activists, people with disabilities used schooling as proof of citizenship, hoping that intellectual achievement would impress upon the nondisabled world the capacity and worth of disabled Americans.
Education was a critical part of Browne's endeavor to redefine an identity category that is no longer in use: the “crippled child.” In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the word cripple incorporated a variety of disabilities now considered medically separate, though its meaning was generally limited to impairments of bones, joints, and limbs—everything from polio and spinal tuberculosis to amputation and birth differences fit into this category. Some people with disabilities also used the word as a rallying identity, tying together people with something in common, and forcing onlookers to rethink their expectations about disability.Footnote 7 Similarly, Browne used the terms cripple and crippled child to describe herself and the children in her care in ways designed to change public mindsets. Browne embraced this umbrella term to unite the children she served into a single identity. As this article addresses, education served as one way to demarcate the boundaries of this category and prove its value.
As Browne conceived it, “crippled childhood” was an exclusive identity as well as an inclusive one, and education determined who lived within its borders. Browne wished for society to envision the “crippled child” not as pitiable but as normal and thus entitled to the rights offered to other “normal” people. Markers of civilization and citizenship played vital roles in her project, making racial and gendered as well as moral behavior subjects of concern.Footnote 8 More critically, the popularity of eugenic thought and its fears about the decay of human breeding stock led Browne to exclude intellectually disabled children not only from her hospital-school but from the category of “crippled child.” The symbolic “feebleminded” child did not just present a social and eugenic threat; its role in public discourse defined its opposite, the normal child.Footnote 9 Although some professionals attempted to provide education to intellectually disabled children, they generally considered “feebleminded” children incapable of citizenship, holding so few rights that they could be unwillingly institutionalized and sterilized with or without parental consent.Footnote 10 By emphasizing physically disabled children's need and aptitude for academic education, Browne highlighted their capacity for true citizenship and allied them with normalcy rather than difference.
I use personal and published sources both by and about Browne to draw these conclusions, including nonfiction and fiction works. Browne self-published her own periodical, The Van Leuven Browne Magazine, for almost eight years and authored much of its content. She also kept several journals and notebooks and compiled a variety of scrapbooks, personal papers, and one partial register of children in the home. Moreover, she told much of her own life story through lightly fictionalized novels and shorter works. For this analysis, I use her three longest literary works: one published novel, Story of the Children's Ward (1906); one published novella, Easter in the Children's Ward (1906); and one partial, unpublished novel, The Skimmings of the Cauldron, or That Which Boiled Over (n.d., circa 1918).Footnote 11
For Browne, fiction served as a way to express her principles to readers in a more engaging and emotionally resonant way than she had space to do in her other writing, and it allows for a deeper appreciation of what priorities and ideologies guided her educational approach. Both historians and literary theorists have argued for the value of fiction as a historical source, suggesting that it offers insights into a period's social and cultural mores, anxieties, and values.Footnote 12 On a smaller scale, Browne's fiction provides an understanding of the moral and social priorities that undergirded her educational choices. These sources are only lightly fictionalized—the main characters of each are thinly veiled versions of their author, living through events described in published accounts of Browne's life and institution and giving impassioned speeches consisting of points from Browne's pamphlets and magazine articles. The Skimmings of the Cauldron, for example, tells the story of a woman who founds a hospital-school for disabled children, adopts a nondisabled child and then several of her patients, is ultimately betrayed by her board, and leaves the city with her children in tow—precisely the trajectory of Browne's own life and career in Detroit.Footnote 13 Articles about and advertisements for her published work emphasized the veracity of the account as a selling point, describing it as having “written an account of her experiences in a Detroit hospital, weaving them into a little story.”Footnote 14 Examining Browne's fiction allows for deeper interpretations suggested by more traditional or straightforward nonfiction sources such as her letters and magazine articles.
Roots of the Van Leuven Browne Hospital-School
Browne contracted polio at the age of three, leaving the right side of her body paralyzed. Doctors declared her case hopeless, but her mother tried self-designed tactics, alternating massage with play to keep Browne entertained and to stimulate her muscles. Upon seeing improvement with this strategy, Browne's mother returned her to the care of doctors, believing that if massage could cure to such an extent, modern medicine could surely do an even better job. She underwent treatment, which included both surgical and nonsurgical therapies like casting and bracing. The medical care suited Browne, but she found the educational opportunities in the hospital lacking. The limited options available led to a disjointed education, and she struggled through eleventh grade before ending her traditional schooling at twenty-one.Footnote 15
Part of her difficulty stemmed from constant interruptions in her learning. Hospitals in this period generally lacked educational opportunities for their patients, and disabled children of all social classes, she later told the Detroit Free Press, found themselves in one of two predicaments. Either they continually struggled to catch up with their academic peers in a time when many complained that schoolchildren were already overworked, or their parents would keep them from school because they believed a “cripple” would have no use for an education.Footnote 16
Browne's early writing highlighted both hospitalized children's desire for knowledge and their lack of access to it. In addition to a variety of personal narratives and nonfiction pieces, Browne also described her childhood through several works of fiction based upon her time in the children's ward. Neither of these works features any formal lessons, instead depicting several characters who worry about falling behind in school while they are in the hospital, or who voice their enthusiasm about eventually returning to school.Footnote 17 Instead of classes, one protagonist, Mary, leads the children in a variety of educational activities and games, from playing kings and queens to lecturing on the story of Jesus and then engaging them in a seminar discussion on Christian theology.Footnote 18 It is likely that Browne cultivated her talents as a leader and educator in a similar fashion during these years. The children she portrayed in the children's ward not only lacked education but craved it, and they undertook to provide it for themselves if necessary.
Browne became determined to start her own institution that would provide the education she and her peers desired. Even as a teenager, she knew the knowledge she had gleaned as a patient was valuable. At fifteen, telling her doctor of her intentions to open an institution of her own, she proclaimed, “I know even better than the doctors can know what a crippled child wants and needs.”Footnote 19 In 1907, almost a decade later, Browne traveled from her hometown of Milford to Detroit to open the Van Leuven Browne Hospital-School.
Browne's venture was notable because of her identity: a former “crippled child” and disabled adult who used her personal experience as the ultimate determinant of her methods. The VLBHS differed from most other educational opportunities for US children with disabilities. Institutions for disabled children usually targeted blind, deaf, or intellectually disabled children, with varying levels and types of education practiced within each. The “crippled child,” by contrast, either attended a mainstream school or remained at home, uneducated or informally educated.Footnote 20 Children often moved between the two options, as they gained or lost nondisabled allies to help them move into or around the building or offer transportation.Footnote 21 City residents might have been able to attend a vocational or hospital-school for physically disabled children or adults, like Boston's Industrial School for Crippled and Deformed Children, which had been in operation since 1893.Footnote 22 The Van Leuven Browne Hospital-School aimed to provide more consistency: education and (limited) medical care provided for as long as needed by someone who understood pupil-patients’ needs.
Early in the project, the school was extremely small, with Browne controlling every aspect; everyone lived and worked within five rented rooms filled with borrowed furniture. At its opening, the VLBHS had only one pupil, and Browne was the only teacher—as well as housemother, superintendent, nurse, and chef. An early article showed the extent of Browne's labors: “Unable to hire a teacher for them, she does this work herself, helps to cook the meals, nurses them—she has studied nursing—and turns over every cent of her earnings which she doesn't require for her actual support to the hospital-school.”Footnote 23 She accrued a few employees over the next three years. The 1910 census shows six adults in residence at 261 Woodland: Blanche, listed as the head of household; her elderly father, Jared Browne; head nurse and trusted ally, Laura O'Neill; two additional nurses; and a cook.Footnote 24 There were also twenty-one children: twenty pupils and Browne's adopted daughter, Esther M. Browne. As time went on, other teachers joined the staff, including Van Leuven Browne Magazine contributor Flora Bangs Jackson, kindergarten teacher Percius Hill, and writer, teacher, and rehabilitation activist Joe F. Sullivan. By 1916, she had cared for 185 children, raised enough money to buy a $50,000 home to house them, formed and dismissed two separate boards of directors, and had attracted the attention of national magazines and prominent politicians.Footnote 25 As head, she retained substantial guidance and control over the curriculum until her departure in 1918.
Writing and Citizenship: Academics in the VLBHS
Education helped Browne to define who the “crippled child” was as well as show what they were capable of doing. For Browne, children with disabilities had inherent worth. A visitor to the home once noted to Browne that “every one of them are [sic] worth it,” and Browne wrote an article about the woman's comment in her magazine in early 1914.Footnote 26 She was so affected by the statement because the visitor saw her purpose in caring for and teaching the children: “Not because they are in need of pity or charity, but because . . . they are worth educating, they are worth caring for and loving and being proud of.”Footnote 27 This worth went beyond earning capacity, self-sufficiency, or rehabilitative potentials. Her children also had intellectual value; Browne decried “the wasting of valuable brains” that their marginalization and neglect represented.Footnote 28 By emphasizing their ability to think and learn, she emphasized their rights and the community's responsibilities to them. She stressed that “crippled children” were not intellectually disabled, not sick, and not necessarily sad—with education and community investment, they could be intelligent, well, and happy.
Browne selected the children of the VLBHS to suit her conception of who the “crippled child” was: an educable, bright, and potentially high-achieving boy or girl. Intellectually disabled children did not qualify. She did attempt to take on a few such children over her career because, she claimed, it was not always clear whether a child was “feebleminded” or merely educationally underdeveloped. Once she determined that they were truly intellectually disabled, she usually discharged them.Footnote 29 This was in keeping with her emphasis on educability and intelligence as a defining feature of the “crippled child.”
“Crippled childhood” in the VLBHS also excluded most children of color, although Browne never explicitly theorized this exclusion and even occasionally subverted it. The demographic makeup of Detroit and surrounding areas in the 1900s and 1910s limited the potential for racial integration in Browne's work; census data registered the city as nearly 99 percent White, and the historical record offers no indication that any Black, Asian American, or Latinx children ever applied for admission.Footnote 30 Furthermore, the VLBHS ostensibly limited admission to White children, at least according to the bylaws created several years after the institution opened.Footnote 31 This sort of restriction was a common feature of early twentieth-century progressive education efforts, many of which claimed to unite people across class while maintaining racial separation.Footnote 32 However, Browne's fiction positively depicted an integrated children's ward; official documents also suggest Browne allowed at least two Indigenous children into the VLBHS.Footnote 33 These children were simply recorded as “Indian” in census and intake documents; no specific information about which nations they may have been affiliated with survives. It is slightly mystifying that these children could be considered both White enough to attend an institution whose bylaws theoretically excluded them but also “Indian” enough to be labeled thus in the US Census or the institution's record books.Footnote 34 One potential answer lies in Browne's hatred of “red tape,” the formalities that restricted both philanthropists and their clients from the mission of improving society.Footnote 35 The concept of institutional bylaws were likely more important to the board of trustees that Browne had acquired by this point than to Browne, whose papers show little evidence of interest in either fully barring or fully welcoming children of color into the VLBHS but whose tolerance for restrictions or oversight by others was quite low. Thus, I suspect that admitting these two “Indian” children was one in a long line of examples of Browne taking the actions she thought best and ignoring official policies.
This should not be taken as a suggestion that Browne was an integrationist or antiracist. Perhaps the best indication of this is her later letters with labor activist Jo Labadie. In one 1919 letter, she tells Labadie that the experience of living among blatantly racist neighbors had made her realize that her previous negative views about African Americans were unjustified (although she does not go into great detail about what those views, which she held during her time running the VLBHS, might have been).Footnote 36 In short, it seems most likely that Browne was blasé about racial integration within her educational project—she was not opposed to it, but saw no need to actively pursue it either. It was less significant to her than the opportunity to provide care and education to White disabled children, who likely reminded her of herself.
Despite these two key exclusions, the VLBHS brought together many different kinds of students, necessitating flexibility. The school was coeducational, and although numbers of attendees are incomplete, the existing records show a roughly equal split between boys and girls over the home's tenure.Footnote 37 Pupil-patients ranged widely in ages; an incomplete record book shows the youngest entrant between 1908 and 1915 was three years of age and the oldest twenty-seven (although this patient only stayed a day); the rest fell between three and eighteen.Footnote 38 The hospital-school's pupil-patients came from a diverse range of social classes; many paid nothing for their care because of poverty, while the highest amount paid was an exorbitant $15 per week for the care of an Ohio doctor's four-year-old girl.Footnote 39 Children also had access to a variety of living situations, and as a result spent differing amounts of time in the hospital-school. Some stayed for years, while other parents collected their children after a brief period in the hospital-school. Some, like Billie Jackson, left and returned several times throughout their childhoods.Footnote 40 Their bodies also experienced a variety of different impairments. One 1917 Van Leuven Browne Magazine cover treated this playfully, featuring an image of three children, one lying on a wheeled bed, one standing, and one riding a seated scooter. It was captioned “Three ‘Modes’ of Travel in the Van Leuven Browne Hospital-School.”Footnote 41 Images throughout the magazine's run captured other modes of travel, including crutches, braces, and wheelchairs.Footnote 42 As much as possible, teachers at the VLBHS gathered all children together for classes, no matter their age, class, or method of mobility.Footnote 43 By the mid-1910s, differentiated courses became available, with Browne teaching “psychology, physiology, and parliamentary law” and other teachers offering music and advanced grades.Footnote 44
Because Browne viewed each child as an individual who had abilities and intellect, she placed a great deal of importance on discovering those capacities, developing them, and showing them to the wider world. This priority meant that the methods the VLBHS used shared commonalities with the approaches of contemporary pedagogical progressives, but were also idiosyncratically pointed toward what Browne thought disabled children needed. The curriculum of the hospital-school had much in common with the teaching styles proposed by pedagogical progressives, who wished to reform schooling to more fully meet the needs of students. Educators like John Dewey and Maria Montessori rejected the usefulness of lecture, memorization, and other rigid elements of contemporary education, prioritizing self-directed learning and hands-on experience to enhance student understanding and engagement.Footnote 45 Although Browne and her employees may have been aware of these famous thinkers, they commonly wrote as though their choices stemmed from their own experiences of and ideas about the most useful kind of learning.Footnote 46 In the eyes of other educators, these kinds of activities helped students learn; Browne's school also emphasized their role as a way to strengthen and showcase disabled students’ capacity to participate as citizens.
This individualized approach also applied to vocational topics. While Browne believed that education could, and should, lead to self-support, her own experience had taught her that one would not necessarily achieve this through an official position, as many vocational schools assumed, but through cultivating one's specific talents. Being that employers often refused to hire even those who had completed vocational training and were qualified for a position, this stance was eminently reasonable.Footnote 47 Browne lacked both the resources and the inclination to establish a large-scale program like those in industrial or vocational training schools. Instead, her institution sought opportunities to foster particular skills and interests emergent in each child. One child, Tootsie, was developing proficiency in music, while other girls practiced sewing or embroidery.Footnote 48 Another student completed correspondence courses in various musical instruments.Footnote 49
This individualized approach confused some powerful onlookers. When reporting on industrial and vocational training at various institutions for disabled children, the nonprofit Russell Sage Foundation simply pronounced that the Van Leuven Browne Hospital-School offered “none.”Footnote 50 In Browne's experience, however, individualized attention was a practical way to offer the disabled children in her care a good chance at employment at which they could succeed.
Browne and her colleagues emphasized making schoolwork a highly prized few hours of effort and reward rather than eight hours of drudgery.Footnote 51 Formal schooling took up a relatively brief part of the children's day. In 1910, the average day began at 6 a.m., when pupil-patients dressed and performed assigned chores chosen according to their physical ability—making beds, sweeping floors, caring for the younger children. After breakfast, they spent time playing on the patio. Classes began at 8:30 a.m., starting with a half-hour of singing and then “‘reading, riting and rithmetic’ follows in the good old-fashioned district school style, with children of all ages in the one room.”Footnote 52 Class ended at 10 a.m.; after lunch was playtime and several walks; sewing class and kindergarten activities occurred every afternoon. The day was designed to keep Browne's pupil-patients busy, to make sure they received fresh air and exercise, and to acknowledge that play was a critical part of children's learning and social development.Footnote 53
In the younger grades, play was incorporated into the classroom itself and wove together both moral and academic educational themes. Learning was disguised in games, songs, and stories. VLBHS teacher Jackson described “The First Day of Kindergarten”: a morning greeting, a prayer, discussions of the ways humans and animals prepare for winter, pretending to be farmers picking and selling autumn crops, and coloring falling leaves. They also played a rhyming game:
One little froggie stubbed his toe,
One little froggie cried out “Oh,”
One little froggie laughed and was glad,
One little froggie cried and was sad,
One little froggie thoughtful and good,
Hopped for the doctor as fast as he could.
This rhyme, said Jackson, may seem like “nothing but play,” but in fact provided a moral and social education, illustrating “how some people are untouched by others’ woes, and some express sorrow only, while still others are not only sorry, but helpful.”Footnote 54
Other aspects of education in the Van Leuven Browne Hospital-School took inspiration from Browne's own academic background, the financial limitations of the institution, and the interests of the students. The lack of textbooks, or lack of funds with which to purchase textbooks, limited their strategies; some grade levels had access to primers, while others had to make do with only a few books. Browne and Jackson spun this situation into an intellectual advantage: “All lessons are taught through word of mouth and in this way the personality of the teacher becomes a most vital and telling factor.”Footnote 55 Browne, naturally, had personality to burn, and both women suggested that the method of transmission made learning subjects such as history and geography seem more like storytelling or a frank discussion than a dry lecture.
Writing instruction was the most important subject because, in Browne's own experience, writing was not just a practical skill—it was a conduit for expressing ideas and articulating a public identity. The way teachers at the VLBHS taught writing emphasized both practicality and student choice. The curriculum placed little emphasis on the theoretics of grammar because, Browne noted: “I never understood a word of all the grammar rules I learned until I was fifteen years old and began to study Latin.”Footnote 56 Writing instruction for kindergarten, for example, focused on being able to write useful and correct correspondence. Once they had learned the alphabet, the teacher asked the younger children what words they would like to learn to spell, and they picked such favorites as mamma, papa, and the names of the adults and children who surrounded them at the hospital-school. They gradually filled in their knowledge with the words that would allow them to write full sentences, and then practiced writing letters each day informed by five simple rules about punctuation and capitalization that would serve them “until they were quite grown up boys and girls in high school.”Footnote 57 This approach combined two aspects of childhood development key to the school's mission: providing practical tools for the future, and encouraging leadership and individual choice among the students.
This approach to writing stemmed from Browne's own life, as writing was both a conduit for expressing her ideas and a means of self-support. When she decided it was time to pursue her adolescent dream of opening an institution for “crippled children” like herself, Browne knew she needed to attract public interest and accrue money. She pursued both goals by novelizing her childhood years spent in Chicago's St. Luke's Hospital. A Story of the Children's Ward and Easter in the Children's Ward were both published in the hope that they would fund the preparation and opening of her institution.
Browne also placed her expertise at the forefront of other calls to action, such as articles in the local and national press written by or about her. These narratives were not merely sentimental tales designed to raise funds; Browne also emphasized that these events were the source of her knowledge about who disabled children were and what they needed. “I was a little girl of 15 when I was sent to the children's ward of a Chicago hospital,” she told the Detroit Free Press in 1907. “I had suffered a great deal and that perhaps helped to sharpen my power for observing the sufferings of others.”Footnote 58 Throughout her life, she elucidated her goals and her work often, in writing, speeches, conversations, and interviews. Always, she included her childhood experiences in presenting both her motivations and her qualifications to undertake the work.Footnote 59 Her firsthand knowledge of disability, exercised through her written work, was the key to her ability to survive and to support her institution.
Her strategy was successful—she inspired loving coverage in the local press and confidence from benefactors. She was proficient at leveraging the media to build public interest, and local and national publications carried her writing on her work and her experiences.Footnote 60 Journalists often used her words for their entire articles with little commentary from the writer or other sources—just a long chain of quotations from Browne.Footnote 61 Likewise, articles written by others proved not only enthusiastic but also lucrative. Reporters who visited the hospital-school wrote inspirational articles about its young residents, like Hazel Welch, a girl who at one point had been considered so near death that her mother had sewn her “an exquisite little white dress for a shroud.”Footnote 62 However, the reporter witnessed a healthy and strong Hazel dancing outside, wearing the dress that her mother had intended for her burial. Browne later wrote that the story was true, had been exceptionally well received in Hazel's hometown, and “brought me a check for $100 the next day.”Footnote 63 Press treatments of Browne, her institution, and her flock of plucky children repeatedly reaped dividends for Browne and her hospital-school in the form of contributions from near and far.
This achievement did not come easily, and her determination to focus on education for her pupil-patients stemmed as much from what she saw as her failures as it did from her successes. Although her writing helped her to achieve many of the tasks she set out to accomplish—raising funds, drawing attention to the hospital-school—she worried about the poor state of her grammar and spelling. “Even now, at the age of thirty, I make many mistakes in writing . . . I know but have never had the kind of practice to make me invariably write correctly.”Footnote 64
In 1910, Browne began a companion organ to the Van Leuven Browne Hospital-School—The Van Leuven Browne Magazine. In it, she told her own story, gave voice to her opinions about childcare and education, featured children from the hospital-school, and reprinted useful, related, or inspiring tidbits from other publications. It is difficult to determine how financially lucrative the magazine was for Browne and the VLBHS. The financial reports printed in the magazine appear irregularly, with some years reporting a “magazines” category with a modest sum, others with a more specific “magazine advertisements” category, which then raises the question of whether the funds raised by subscription are folded into the umbrella category of “donations.”Footnote 65 Additionally, it is impossible to know how many donations, large and small, monetary or in-kind, were inspired by the magazine's content. However, it is clear that Browne saw her writing as a chance to promote her political interests and to support herself and her endeavors.
The VLBHS incorporated a variety of opportunities for experiential learning that developed both writing and citizenship in its pupil-patients, beginning with the institutional magazine's publishing practices. The children were encouraged to write their thoughts and share them, and Browne featured them in the Van Leuven Browne Magazine frequently. In the magazine's early years, she wrote about her pupil-patients, quoting things they had said and portraying them as articulate, funny, lovable children. Soon, she began sharing their conversations with readers in sections such as “What the Children Say” and “Recess Talk.”Footnote 66 In subsequent years, Browne began devoting more space to work authored by children in the hospital-school, featuring pieces designed to prove their worth and their intellectual capacity. By September of 1913, these had broken out of a children's section and were simply letters after the initial editorial; the last issue of that year featured a thereafter recurring column called “Scraps from the Children's Note Books.”Footnote 67 This feature promised glimpses into the sorts of subjects that children took up in their daily lessons. The brief compositions encompassed a variety of topics, from twelve-year-old Mildred Quinn's report on Henry Ford's commitment to workers to Charles Brown's paper on geneticist Luther Burbank.Footnote 68
Browne also fostered opportunities for children to edit. By 1911, “The Children's Department” had a named editor: Zella Berry, a thirteen-year-old survivor of hip tuberculosis.Footnote 69 In 1914, twelve-year-old Jean Osborne Browne (who, as the name suggests, Browne had adopted) edited a section called “People and Things We Ought to Know About.”Footnote 70 In publishing pupil-patients’ work in this way and offering them the opportunity to serve as editors, Browne gave them more than work experience that could translate to a future livelihood. She also taught the students the potential power of their words and their work in a public forum, let them practice representing the image of the articulate, well-adjusted disabled child, and showed readers that these children were capable not only of writing their experiences but of being savvy editors.
Children also undertook positions of leadership in an organization they created. The Do It Well Club, founded in the autumn of 1913, urged its active members “to do well whatever they attempt to do, either in work or play.”Footnote 71 More than moral achievement, however, the organization was born out of an interest in what other disabled children were doing across the nation and a desire to correspond with them. The announcement promised that all new members would receive as welcome “a shower of Post Cards from the Home Circle Club.”Footnote 72 These children were not only practicing the writing skills that Browne promoted so fervently, they were also organizing into a group that would foster a shared identity of “crippled-childness,” one which emphasized action, intellect, and community. The club continued to advertise in the magazine's pages and had some success at connecting with other disabled young people. Gertrude Schulze, a teenaged survivor of hip tuberculosis from Nashville, Michigan, wrote to the children of the Do It Well Club beginning in 1914—a correspondence that continued until at least 1919.Footnote 73
The VLBHS summer camping trips between 1915 and 1918 placed students in roles of authority as well. At the suggestion of teenager Earl Casey, a pupil-patient at the Van Leuven Browne Hospital-School, Browne took the VLBHS children to Port Huron, Michigan, to camp out all summer in 1915, and the group returned each summer for the next several years.Footnote 74 The Port Huron camp allowed the children to practice leadership and self-government. The children crafted their own list of rules, which they posted on a tree; the “oldest boy in camp,” Casey served as the adjudicator of any disputes or rulebreaking.Footnote 75 Day-to-day operations also benefited from pupil-patient management. Browne's business manager for the camp was Joe Harper, a fourteen-year-old boy “scarcely as high as a tall man's knees” who handled orders, errands, and supplies.Footnote 76 The daily schedule for the summer of 1916 shows that on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, older children Jean Browne and Mildred Quinn led classes on the beach—Browne with the Camp Fire Girls and Quinn with the Bluebirds and Robins— while Blanche Browne led one for the nurses, and the now-employed Casey led the Boy Scouts. Quinn also led kindergarten classes every afternoon that summer.Footnote 77 The environment of camp allowed students to attempt roles as workers and teachers, which might open career paths for them. It also allowed them to try their hand at imagining their own society and its rules, which gave them a stake in considering the meanings of community, identity, and citizenship. Moreover, by publicizing the children's ability to engage in such activities, Browne made a public argument for their worth and competence.
Moral Instruction and Gender Roles
Undergirding these lessons was a commitment to moral instruction. Critically, the ideals Browne prized applied to both disabled and nondisabled children. In some ways, her interest in teaching moral conduct echoed the words of other rehabilitationists, who saw disabled children as uniquely subject to laziness and moral turpitude and thus in need of special moral education.Footnote 78 However, Browne approached the topic from a slightly different angle, treating moral education as critical to all children but emphasizing that the stakes were higher for disabled children. Such children needed moral education to conform with social norms, particularly around gender; in the process, they would serve as living disproof of negative stereotypes about disability and assure themselves the acceptance and love of the nondisabled.
Through her writing, Browne promoted her ideal moral education for both disabled and nondisabled children. Perhaps most significant was Browne's dedication to being truthful with her pupil-patients, evoking the concern with dispensing accurate information common among progressive women reformers of her era.Footnote 79 Browne was adamant that only true things were useful to children, not fairy stories or myths about storks or Santa Claus. In her unpublished novel The Skimmings of the Cauldron, Browne encoded not only many details of her own experience of opening, running, and eventually losing control of the hospital-school into one fictionalized protagonist, Christine Harris, but she also used both Harris and another protagonist, Betty Bestman, to convey generalized beliefs about child-rearing and medicine. One of her most prominent and perhaps oddest contributions in this line of the story is Bestman's child, called Little Son, who relates to his parents how he had quarreled with his friend over her belief in fairies. He finds this absurd, as “our own natural people called Scientists are greater than any make-believe fairies that were ever in story books. I told her that no fairy could do things more wonderful than Edison.” The reality of these great figures meant that children could one day become just as powerful and wise, while they could never hope to become fairies. Even young women like his friend could take heart—“I told her about Jane Addams so she could see she had a good chance, too.”Footnote 80 Like Little Son, the children at the VLBHS learned to see the world itself as a wondrous place, with no need to augment it with untruths. The walls in Browne's ideal classrooms held “pictures of Edison-Ford-Burbank”— real, living men of science and industry.Footnote 81
Even topics commonly considered unsavory were truths that demanded to be faced head-on, within certain limits. Skimmings also featured a chapter in which a female doctor, too embarrassed to explain to her son that she was having another baby and answer his questions about how babies came to be, attempted to drop off her son at Christine Harris's hospital-school. This event gave Harris an opening to discuss her (or, rather, Browne's) philosophy about explaining such matters to children:
God does not make the Truths of our Life too complicated to prevent the youngest child grasping and holding and understanding if only Grown-up people did not consider themselves wiser than God, and refuse to tell the truth to children, but instead invent lies and give them deliberately to God's children for God's truth.Footnote 82
Not only could children be told the truth, but it was also morally imperative for adults to do so. Browne, through Harris, ultimately concluded that the ills of “the present day world [are] the result of the lies mothers have told their children about God and Life.”Footnote 83
Rather than misleading children to retain their innocence, parents and teachers should provide the sort of education that would prepare children to do battle with temptations or despair. One man visiting the VLBHS lambasted Browne for allowing her boys to read the newspaper, which contained tobacco and liquor advertisements: “Do you think it is right for you to put temptation in their way?” She replied:
If my boys fourteen years of age are not able to stand on their own principals [sic] now the(y) never will be. I know my boys. It does not speak very well for my influence up until they are fourteen if I can't trust them and depend on them at that age. What kind of molly coddles do [you] think I mean to send out into the world? My boys will be men.Footnote 84
Following her critic's departure, she queried her boys about whether they had noticed any such advertisements. No, they replied, they could not recall any. “This only goes to prove,” she declared, “that we see the things that interest us.”Footnote 85 Browne's implication: her boys did not notice the advertisements because she had trained them to focus on more wholesome matters. Clearly, the man who had confronted her was not similarly inclined. Her book of plans and notes included a draft of “The Moral Platform on Which the Van Leuven Browne Boys Stand.” The piece denoted their knowledge of and regard for the body, Nature, and the power of married love; their renunciation of “evil habits” surrounding sex, alcohol, and tobacco; and their commitment to honesty and helping other boys live clean and moral lives.Footnote 86 This type of moral education would equip them to live honorable lives and grapple directly with any immoral influences that came their way; it also suggested that the physically disabled boys in her care were eugenically fit enough to marry someday.
As the boys’ moral platform might suggest, gender distinction also played a role in Browne's approach to education, and it is in this area in which she specified the unique importance of moral instruction to disabled youth. Disability has historically threatened prevailing gender norms, as it has often required altering expected dynamics surrounding work and home life as well as bodily interactions with space, objects, and other bodies.Footnote 87 As historians have shown, at the turn of the century, ideas about gender differences were linked to civilized status. If a society or group had differing roles for men and women, then that society or group was considered more civilized; fewer distinction between genders in daily routines meant that a group was less evolved and therefore less capable or deserving of political power.Footnote 88 For Browne to prove that her charges were civilized—that they could become adults in nondisabled American society—she needed to encourage them to distinguish themselves by gender.
Manliness was especially relevant. Some historians have argued that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a period of masculinity in crisis. Shifts in the practices of capitalism made it harder for men to practice self-reliant middle-class masculinity through their careers; challenges from women, working-class men, and immigrants led to fears of weakness and loss of virility among the American middle-class male population.Footnote 89 Theodore Roosevelt reshaped himself into the model of virile American manhood by linking masculinity to civilization.Footnote 90 Roosevelt's views on manliness seem to have struck a chord with Browne—she saved a clipping of his comments to a group of Boy Scouts about appropriate comportment for boys, which included efficiency, consideration for others, and the ability to “hold his own.”Footnote 91 In this piece, Roosevelt says he has “no use for mollycoddles,” the same word Browne later used in responding to the man who chastized her for letting boys read newspapers.Footnote 92 Practical ways in which she encouraged manliness in the home included starting the world's first troop of disabled Boy Scouts, soon joined by a troop of disabled Camp Fire Girls.Footnote 93 She would later develop this into an argument she titled “Conscription for Cripples,” in which she used the evidence of the Boy Scouts in her care to argue that the nation could conscript disabled men as farmers, allowing them to perform a patriotic service just as nondisabled men could do.Footnote 94 Through an appropriate moral education, Browne believed, disabled boys would rise to the occasion of manhood, proving themselves capable of citizenship.
Although Browne was most concerned with the appropriate conduct of disabled boys, her writing also suggests that she approached the moral education of disabled girls in a similarly specific way. Any girl, of course, should be pleasant, kind, and thoughtful, but a disabled girl especially so, for her life and livelihood could depend on her winning the love of others to take care of her. In Browne's unpublished novel, protagonist Harris instructed one of the girls in her care that disobedience had stark consequences for a disabled girl, as she depended on the kindness of others:
If a little girl is a cripple . . . and has to be waited on more than other children then that is all the more reason for her to be always sweet tempered and kind to everybody, and she should be taught to be obedient and not make any more trouble than she can help.Footnote 95
Of course, gendered expectations for disabled women often conflicted with the need of many to earn their own money.Footnote 96 Perhaps because of this complication, as well as the societal expectations that disabled men were weak and effeminate, Browne seemed far more concerned with instilling masculinity in boys than femininity in girls. Appropriately gendered behavior marked a disabled child as one who had the potential to participate in mainstream public and private life, whether through masculine self-sufficiency, feminine charm, or an appropriately winsome combination of the two.
The End of an Era
Browne's control over the institution lasted a decade. The seeds of her downfall were, in part, sown by her enthusiasm for extending her educational practices. When she saw the opportunity to transform the hospital-school into an “educational colony” in nearby Farmington in 1915, she jumped at the chance, joining forces with a group of trustees and fundraisers. She signed her ownership of her entire enterprise over to this board of trustees. In exchange, they promised her continued control of the everyday functions of the hospital-school when it moved outside the city: “It was understood that I should retain the Superintendency and that my methods of education and treatment should be retained.”Footnote 97 It was a significant risk, but the possibilities seemed worth it—more space, more funding, and greater community investment in her methods.
The newly-empowered board reinterpreted Browne's tenets through a more business-friendly progressive lens—one which emphasized efficiency and self-sufficiency as the natural ends of education. The campaign literature highlighted the trade education that would be available in the new space: boys could become “expert farmers,” and all could “learn a trade that will make them self-supporting.”Footnote 98 Education had been transformed into something more palatable by focusing on vocational training. The choice of a farm colony seems a particularly stark contrast to the VLBHS's previous work when you consider the move to the farm colony model of many institutions for intellectually disabled children and adults by 1910.Footnote 99 This sort of work did not seem like a natural fit for the “crippled child” Browne had described, full of unique talents and intellectual vibrancy. Browne herself, however, remained committed to the critical possibilities of children with disabilities writing at the new location. One of the plans she was most enthusiastic about implementing at Farmington: “a Publishing House managed & operated by Cripples & for Cripples.”Footnote 100 This plan would serve both of Browne's expectations for writing and education: practical training and jobs for residents, and a platform for disabled experiences to be developed and distributed.
By 1918, Browne realized that the VLBHS board members did not intend to follow her wishes for the hospital-school. The control the board had promised her was illusory; she received salary increases even as her actual ability to impact policy waned. The final straw came with one significant medical change to the educational colony plan: they intended to introduce orthopedic surgery into the institution. For six months, Browne struggled with this news, believing firmly that such treatments were ineffective and even harmful to the children who received them. Since she had opened the VLBHS, her views had shifted from embracing most medical approaches to disability to staunch criticism of surgical intervention.Footnote 101 Finally, effective August 1, 1918, Browne resigned. On her way out of Detroit, she had adopted several pupil-patients to keep them from the VLBHS surgeons, bringing her total of adopted children to something between nine and eleven children—sources vary on the final number.Footnote 102
After the summer camp at Port Huron had ended for the year, Browne, her children, and her father left for a new and uncertain future on the East Coast. “I am resigning,” she told a reporter. “I cannot stay and see practiced vivi-sective surgery in which I do not believe. . . . I believe the greatest cure is the air, the water and sunshine. I cure by congenial surroundings, plenty of healthy exercise, good food and happiness.”Footnote 103 In the split, she gave up not only the institution but also the Van Leuven Browne Magazine, the building that housed the hospital-school, and the city she loved.Footnote 104
After she lost control of the institution and cut ties with its leaders, Browne remained committed to the power of writing and education. The years after she left Detroit with a large and challenging family tried her every skill and limit. At times it seemed that the family would have to split up, casting itself on the welfare and charitable organizations that might be most likely to support each member. Sometimes her children were sick or injured, and aid promised to her from some supporters never materialized. She claimed the institution's board was falsely telling Detroit locals that the board was contributing to her support, thereby dissuading other organizations and individuals from sending aid themselves.Footnote 105 She referenced her inspiration for beginning a new writing practice at this phase in an entry in February 1918: “Every day I must write notes—some observation or knowledge gained from my own experience.”Footnote 106 Yet again, Browne looked to her own life as the author of her expertise and set out to make sure that she would receive and store any insights it brought to her. By September of 1919, Browne had relocated to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where she continued writing and living with various members of her changing family for the next decade with the help of sporadic support from an eclectic series of local interests and her children's forays into paid work.Footnote 107 As one of her foster daughters later wrote, Browne “passed to a wider plane of influence in 1930, after having been an invalid for a number of years.”Footnote 108
Conclusion
Education played an essential role in Browne's project of defining the “crippled child” as a particular disabled identity. Using her own childhood as a guide, she emphasized that physically disabled children not only wanted an education but that they were worth educating, being both capable and deserving of the same rights as nondisabled children. Her emphasis on intellect established a boundary between physically and intellectually disabled children, allying her charges with normality and distancing them from the eugenic specter of feeblemindedness.
In the same spirit, the education she promoted went beyond vocational training, seeking not only to equip disabled children for self-support but also equal citizenship and self-expression. Writing, citizenship training in the form of opportunities for self-direction and leadership, and gendered moral instruction all promised to help disabled children become as close to “normal” as possible.
The influence of Browne's educational approach suffered from her transition out of power, as the new leadership pursued lines of rhetoric and practice that emphasized efficiency, standardization, and medical intervention over Browne's more individualized and educational approach. Browne herself occupied little space in the institutional memory of the hospital-school and other “crippled children's” organizations after 1918. However, the significance of education continued to inform efforts for disabled children in subsequent years, most notably through the work of Sullivan, Browne's employee and successor. The VLBHS board changed the institution's name to the Michigan Hospital School and continued to educate disabled children, even as it also emphasized surgical cures. The institution's magazine, retitled The Hospital School Journal, maintained the tradition of publishing the words of disabled children, albeit in a more limited fashion.Footnote 109 Perhaps most significantly, Browne's conception of the category of the “crippled child”—a child with physical disabilities, innate worth, and intellectual capacity—provided a jumping-off point for debates about defining the term into the twentieth century.
