“TO RENDER USEFUL TO SOCIETY THEIR HANDS”: REHABILITATING THE WORK ETHIC

The first school-based workshop in the United States, founded by Samuel Gridley Howe in 1840 at the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts, was intended to provide graduates with remunerative employment after efforts to secure competitive positions in the community failed (Klages Reference Klages1999, 34–46; tenBroek Reference tenBroek1966). Modeling Perkins on the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles, founded in Paris in 1785 by Valentin Haüy, Howe, following Haüy, challenged the assumption that blind people were “consigned by destiny to idleness, languor, and dependence,” instead seeing education as a means of “render[ing] useful to society their hands” (Haüy Reference Haüy1793, 222, 227). Aided by developments in tactile printing technology, students received a vocational as well as an intellectual education with the hope that the focused development of their individual strengths—rather than an emphasis on handicrafts and manual labor alone—would “ensure…them a competent livelihood” (Howe Reference Howe1833, 48).

Despite their well-rounded education, however, students struggled to find employment once they left the institution. If Howe had initially argued for the relative insignificance of sight for the acquisition of knowledge—extolling the “tenaci[ty],” attentiveness, and even “superiority” of blind students as compared with their more “negligent” and “listless[]” sighted peers—the limited prospects of the school’s early graduates prompted a reconsideration of the purpose and aims of education and a reevaluation of the limits imposed by blindness on the moral and intellectual capacities of the child (Howe Reference Howe1833, 28). Evident in the Institute’s annual reports, this transition from the celebratory optimism of the 1830s to the sober pessimism of the 1840s and 1850s tracks a broader shift in medical and scientific understandings of the causes and consequences of blindness. Writing in 1848, Howe admitted that “the powers and capacities of the blind seem to have been overrated” (Reference Howe1848a, 31). Indeed, “but very few…can fully earn their own livelihood” (Reference Howe1848b, 56). Nevertheless, it was imperative that Perkins “provide them with means for putting themselves more nearly upon a footing with others” (Reference Howe1848a, 52). It was out of this desire to provide graduates with paid employment and “a feeling of independence” that the workshop was born (Reference Howe1848b, 56).

One of the earliest schools for the blind in the United States, Perkins became a model for other institutions for the blind as well as for the handful of training schools for “idiots” and the “feebleminded” that were founded in the mid-nineteenth century (Altschuler Reference Altschuler2020; Klages Reference Klages1999; Trent Reference Trent2012). I begin with Perkins in part because it helps map the transformation of the workshop from an experimental supplement to the mid-century institution to a permanent standalone facility—a transformation that laid the groundwork for custodial institutions’ later reliance on inmate labor. More specifically, a focused analysis of the Perkins workshop—and Howe’s and the Perkins trustees’ evolving views about the workshop—illustrates how this aspect of institutional life came to embody broader tensions between the ethical duty to work and the “real conditions of…employment” characteristic of the rapidly industrializing mid-century society (Weeks Reference Weeks2017, 40; cf. Chamberlain Reference Chamberlain2018; Rodgers Reference Rodgers2014; Witt Reference Witt1998). Neither fully integrated into the competitive labor market nor immune to its moral and ideological imperatives, blind workers were expected to exhibit “proper views of the dignity of labor,” even as they were prevented from “earning a livelihood in any common way” (Perkins Institution for the Blind 1843, 11; 1846, 8). As such, they provide a unique vantage point from which to examine, first, how institutional labor was distinguished from competitive employment; and second, how this distinction charts broader shifts in the nature of work.

Situating Perkins within a longer history of institutionalization, scholars of disability often emphasize the exclusionary effects of industrialization and the “incompatibility of blindness and market relations” (Klages Reference Klages1999, 8; cf. Davis Reference Davis1995, 86–90; Ryan and Thomas Reference Ryan and Thomas1980). Evident in Howe’s and the trustees’ reports on the progress of the workshop and their dismay at graduates’ unsuccessful efforts to secure competitive employment, these accounts, which focus mainly on what the antipathy between work and disability can tell us about emerging understandings of disability, have less to say about what we might also learn about work and its imperatives. In contrast, I suggest we treat the workshop as significant both for what it conveys about blindness—and disability generally—and for what it can tell us about the effort entailed in preserving the moral significance of work during a period of considerable social and economic upheaval. While the Perkins reports are, by their nature, focused on the challenges and successes faced by the Institution’s students and graduates, they are reflective of the social, political, and economic milieu in which blindness as a focus of reform and rehabilitation took shape.

Writing in Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault famously links the “great confinement” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the “imperative of labor” and the threat of idleness (Reference Foucault1988, 46). Initially offered as a solution to the economic crises that accompanied the emergence of the market economy, confinement, on Foucault’s reading, did not so much address poverty and vagrancy as instill in inmates the correct attitude toward labor—“a certain ethical consciousness” that was, in effect, disconnected from traditional measures of “utility or profit” (Reference Foucault1988, 55, 57). This separation between the productivity of labor and the particular “ordering of life and conscience” that was its condition of possibility attunes us to a similar dynamic at play within nineteenth-century institutions for the blind like Perkins (Foucault Reference Foucault1988, 63). Certainly, these institutions were less transparently about the need to address vagrancy and idleness than their European antecedents, but they exhibit a similar tension between the need to engage their charges in “honest and honorable labor” (Perkins Institution for the Blind 1837, 10), and the recognition that such efforts were unlikely to “be a source of gain to the Institution” (Perkins Institution for the Blind 1841, 15). Although Howe certainly hoped that workshop employees would eventually be able to “fully earn their own livelihood,” his belief that the workshop was a necessary adjunct to the institution illustrates the extent to which the moral dimensions of labor—and the need to keep blind people “steadily and industriously at work”—came to outweigh its economic utility (Howe Reference Howe1848b, 56–7).

Here, I draw on Foucault less for his historical account of confinement than for what his analysis of “the organization of a disciplinary space”—and the role of work within such spaces—reveals about the “network of sociopolitical relations” in which the workshop took shape (Foucault Reference Foucault and Davidson2006, 217; Huffer Reference Huffer2010, 26).Footnote ⁶ If Foucault’s interest in confinement primarily concerns its elaboration of a novel form of disciplinary power, his attention to the “practice of putting patients to work” alerts us to the significance of these spaces of productive confinement for organizing and articulating “a new ethic of work” whose implications extended beyond the walls of the institution (Foucault Reference Foucault and Davidson2006, 127; Reference Foucault1988, 46). “It is in this context,” Foucault writes, “that the obligation to work assumes its meaning as both ethical exercise and moral guarantee” (Reference Foucault1988, 59).

Indeed, it was the specificity of the workshop and its orientation toward blind workers’ “peculiar mode of working,” as well as its relative isolation from the competitive labor market, that made it such a fertile site for negotiating the tension between the moral primacy of work and the threat posed by wage labor (Perkins Institution for the Blind 1843, 13). Less efficient and exacting than their sighted counterparts, and characterized by a “constitutional feebleness of organization,” the blind worker was judged uniquely incapable of adapting to the newly mechanized workplace (Howe Reference Howe1848a, 46). “Nothing about the establishment is calculated for blind persons, to whom rumbling cog-wheels, revolving bands, and whirling saws … are objects of fear and of real danger” (Perkins Institution for the Blind 1843, 13). Should blind workers “seek[] employment in a common shop,” the Institute’s trustees warned, they would “find[] nothing adapted to…[their] peculiar way of working” (Perkins Institution for the Blind 1845, 5). Agreed Howe: “All the known and practised modes of doing business or of performing handicraft work are adapted to the sense of sight” (Reference Howe1850, 38).

If blind workers were both excluded from the competitive labor market and expected to “exercis[e]…[their] talents in a useful and profitable manner,” it was up to institutions to bridge this gap (Howe Reference Howe1848b, 65). They were to become, in Howe’s words, “capitalists of the blind” (Reference Howe1848b, 65), providing materials and tools, and, if necessary, supplementing workers’ pay “so as to raise them enough to support life in comfort” (Reference Howe1852, 24–5). Institutions, he clarified, “must come to the aid of many of the blind” (Reference Howe1850, 33) and “make such arrangements as will protect…[them] from unfair competition…and give them the same aid which other workmen have from [the] combination of labor and capital” (Reference Howe1848b, 73). As for the workshop’s employees, the challenges posed by competitive employment did not absolve them from the demand that they, too, become “industrious members of society…and useful citizens” (Reference Howe1876, 38). If anything, it was the inability of blind graduates to secure employment outside the workshop that gave added moral weight to their labor. Insisted Howe: “We have to teach them that work is honorable, and that an idle, unproductive life is the truly dishonorable one” (Reference Howe1875, 58).

In stressing the moral necessity of work, Howe and the Perkins trustees echoed a number of mid-century educators and social reformers.Footnote ⁷ At once educative, therapeutic, and disciplinary, work took on a significance that far exceeded either its economic rewards or the conditions of its performance (Carmody Reference Carmody2022; Hunnicutt Reference Hunnicutt2013; Rodgers Reference Rodgers2014; Thompson Reference Thompson1967; Witt Reference Witt1998). The emergence of an industrial economy notwithstanding, older visions of work, in which moral obligation was balanced by the dignity, independence, and civic standing its performance was thought to confer, still held sway. Far more reflective of the economy of small landholders, merchants, and artisans that characterized the post-revolutionary period, these visions of work—and the ideals of free labor and republican citizenship to which they were joined—were increasingly at odds with the rhythms of factory production (Foner Reference Foner1995; Gourevitch Reference Gourevitch2011; Reference Gourevitch2015; Rana Reference Rana2010; Rodgers Reference Rodgers2014; Shklar Reference Shklar1991; Stanley Reference Stanley1998). At once animated and challenged by the presence of chattel slavery, the expansion of waged work further highlighted the tensions between the independence thought necessary for full citizenship and the perception that “the wage earner was somehow less than fully free” (Foner Reference Foner1995, xvii; cf. Glickman Reference Glickman1997; Foner Reference Foner1994; Roediger Reference Roediger2007). Speaking to the effort needed to uphold the moral significance of work absent “the network of economics and values that had given it birth,” Daniel Rodgers contends that the relationship between work and work values during this period was not challenged so much as “reinforce[d]” and “pitched at a new level of abstraction” (Reference Rodgers2014; xii–xiii). That is, rather than calling into question the continued usefulness of a work ethic forged in the pre-industrial period, men like Howe instead attempted to graft earlier visions of work—and the moral commitments they inspired—onto a world in which even “the simplest trades…[were] becoming subdivided; and independent artisans…[were] becoming hirelings” (Howe Reference Howe1848b, 60).

Within this context, the workshop took on a dual, if contradictory, role. On the one hand, it recalled an earlier era in which “the province of handicraft”—in this case, the manufacture of doormats, cane chairs, baskets, and mattresses—hadn’t yet been “usurp[ed]” by machinery (Perkins Institution for the Blind 1846, 12). Here, in other words, was an “industrious community” in which work, though waged, still retained a connection to the “dignified and productive labor [that] served as the foundation of personal and national virtue” (Perkins Institution for the Blind 1841, 16; Witt Reference Witt1998, 1471). At the same time, it was the workshop’s relative isolation and distinctiveness—its cultivation of “a peculiar kind of training” through which workers might be made to “feel” (but not be) independent—that was essential to maintaining this connection (Howe Reference Howe1848b, 56–7). Protected from the “tireless sinews of iron” that dominated factory production (Perkins Institution for the Blind 1846, 12), this “company of blind persons”—marked as they were by “infirmity,” “abnormal[ity],” and a “constitutional feebleness of organization” (Howe Reference Howe1848b, 59; Reference Howe1851, 12; Reference Howe1848a, 46)—came to embody the relationship between the ideal of work and its execution that was being eroded by industrial production.

Anxious to secure graduates’ ability to “support themselves…by a hard, but honest and honorable labor,” Howe and the trustees remained wary of the effects of industrialization and mechanization on both blind and sighted workers (Perkins Institution for the Blind 1837, 10). Noting that even the “strong man has been pushed aside by the stronger steam engine” and “outdone by fingers and pickers of wood and iron,” they attempted to reassert the dignity of labor in the context of the workshop’s emphasis on the “simplest trades” and handicrafts (Howe Reference Howe1848b, 59–60).

Turning in the next section to the expansion of custodial institutions for the “feebleminded” in the latter half of the nineteenth century, I show how the conflicting justifications offered for school-based workshops—that they were uniquely adapted to “the real condition and capacities of the blind,” and necessary for blind persons to “be taken as equal, independent and useful members…[of] general society,” laid the groundwork for the delegitimization of inmate labor as work (Howe Reference Howe1848a, 34; Reference Howe1868, 25). In so doing, they disregarded the affinities between the unpaid labor performed within institutions and what International Harvester’s H. A. Worman referred to as the “routine muscular effort” required by new production techniques (quoted in Montgomery Reference Montgomery1987, 61). Just as the workshop employee was prevented from entering the competitive labor market “on account of his blindness” and held up as an example of the “habits of regularity and industry” that were essential to the work ethic (Howe Reference Howe1848a, 33; Reference Howe1852, 15), so too did institutional inmates come to embody the kinds of discipline, “order,…and obedience” judged essential to industrial production (Wilbur Reference Wilbur1852, 21).

“WILLING, HAPPY LABORERS”: PRODUCTIVE NONWORK IN THE INSTITUTIONFootnote ⁸

Remarking, toward the end of his life, on the shrinking “field of simple handicraft in which the blind man could work,” Howe would again stress the importance of cultivating students’ “desire of independence” and “dread of dependence” (Reference Howe1874, 34; Reference Howe1875, 109, 57). And yet, if workshops helped “sustain ideas about the dignity of work and the moral value of labor” during a period of extraordinary economic and social transformation, they also provided a rationale for institutions’ reliance on inmate labor (Witt Reference Witt1998, 1468). Abandoning an earlier emphasis on rehabilitation and educability, new understandings of the heritability of degeneracy and deviance demanded a different approach, one that was less oriented toward inmates’ eventual “restora[tion]…to their friends and to society” (Wilbur Reference Wilbur1852, 19), and more toward what Walter Fernald, superintendent of the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded, described as “retention and guardianship” (Reference Fernald1893, 210).

If the resulting expansion of state institutions signaled a shift in the treatment of mental and physical abnormalities, it also placed increasing demands on state budgets, forcing superintendents to find new ways to contain costs while maintaining quality of care. Inmate labor—both in the institution and on separate farm colonies—offered a solution to both these problems, not only reducing per-capita expenses but also aiding in the “daily routine work of a large institution” and the care of the so-called lower-grade residents (Fernald Reference Fernald1893, 218; cf. Arneil Reference Arneil2017, 111–34; Rose Reference Rose2017, 49–90; Trent Reference Trent2017).

Addressing the tension between the widespread exclusion of disabled workers from the wage labor market, on the one hand, and custodial institutions’ dependence on unpaid inmate labor, on the other, Sarah Rose credits the unrelenting speed and physical demands of industrial labor. Privileging workers with “intact, interchangeable bodies” that could be easily fitted to the machines they were called upon to attend, there was little room for disabled workers in this new economy (Rose Reference Rose2017, 2). “Made unproductive” by the demands of the “modern, mechanized, and efficient workplace,” the exclusion of people with disabilities from the wage labor market facilitated both the precipitous growth of inmate populations and institutions’ dependence on the labor of these supposedly “unproductive burdens” (Rose Reference Rose2017, 2, 12, 14; cf. Oliver Reference Oliver and Barton1989; Ryan and Thomas Reference Ryan and Thomas1980). Broadly concurring with Rose’s assessment, Lennard Davis focuses on the machine itself, showing how ability—specifically, the ability to work—was defined relative to an individual’s capacity to “operate machines” (Reference Davis1995, 87). Insofar as the worker’s body (and, by association, the body politic) was “reshap[ed]” by its interaction with the machine and mechanized labor, the consolidation of the link between work and citizenship depended upon the denial of work’s disabling effects (Davis Reference Davis1995, 88).

If our earlier engagement with the Perkins archive clarified the ways that workshop labor was used to both address the diminished conditions of competitive employment and uphold work as foundational to citizenship, it also illustrated the need to interrogate the assumed opposition between disability and industrial labor. When nineteenth and early twentieth-century commentators expressed misgivings about the effects of industrialization on workers, they were not only referring to industrial accidents and illnesses. Worrisome, too, were the moral and psychological consequences of industrialization, particularly for unskilled and semi-skilled laborers.Footnote ⁹ However, industrial labor did not just cause disabilities—it also demanded a different kind of worker, one that could withstand repetitive, minutely subdivided, and simplified tasks (Glenn Reference Glenn2002; Montgomery Reference Montgomery1987; Moore Reference Moore2002; Rodgers Reference Rodgers2014; Slavishak Reference Slavishak2008; Wolkowitz Reference Wolkowitz2006). Consider, for example, Reverend R. Heber Newton’s concern that the once-skilled worker had been “reduced” to “feeding and watching the great machine which ha[d] been endowed with the brains that once was in the human toiler” (U.S. Congress 1885a, 549). Or Francis Amasa Walker’s observation that the “habits of labor and mental attention” required of the factory operative had left them without the “varied experience or acquirements…[of] the farmer, or country carpenter, or country blacksmith” (U.S. Congress 1885b, 328). Arguing that “industrial aptitudes” were both inherited and “made,” Walker—superintendent of the 1880 census and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—called attention to the risks posed by mechanized production in a society that still held fast to the belief that work was both requisite for citizenship and a mark of independence (U.S. Congress 1885a, 545; cf. Bernstein and Leonard Reference Bernstein and Leonard2009, 184). Insofar as the health and well-being of the worker were often taken as proxies for national efficiency and vitality, the deleterious effects of industrialization presented an acute problem. Simply put, what if the ideal worker was not the independent small producer but instead the minutely managed and highly choreographed machine tender?

Faced with this prospect, custodial labor emerges as a rhetorical foil in debates over the changing economy—at once distracting from the degradations of mechanized production and propping up older agrarian and craft-based ideals that linked the moral significance of work to visions of independent proprietorship. Indeed, many of the disciplinary techniques used to spur inmates’ productivity—techniques superintendents argued were proof of the necessity of life-long custodial care—bear a striking resemblance to those deployed within the industrial workplace. This was especially true with the introduction of new managerial practices aimed at the intelligent direction and control of the worker. Placing the growing dominance of wage labor alongside—rather than in opposition to—custodialization shows how these parallel histories worked together to uphold earlier ideologies of work amidst a rapidly shifting economic reality. “Withdrawn from the community,” and thought incapable of being “restore[d]…to safe citizenship” beyond the institution, the inmate laborer found its double in the imagined ideal worker of the industrial factory (Kerlin Reference Kerlin1886, 296; Powell Reference Powell1898, 293). Clarifying this relationship helps explain how work was maintained as “an act of virtue” and “vital center of living” even as its real conditions underwent a radical transformation (Rodgers Reference Rodgers2014, xi). Viewed alongside the emergence of managerial practices directed toward “reengineering the labor process itself,” the place of inmate labor within the institution—and its delegitimization as “real” work—helped postpone uncomfortable revelations about the shifting terrain of competitive employment and its implications for citizenship (Salzinger Reference Salzinger2003, 18; cf. Welke Reference Welke2010).

Drawing out the connections between inmate and paid work requires, first, understanding the process by which inmates were judged “unfit to be sent into the general community” despite their (sometimes considerable) productive capacities (Kerlin Reference Kerlin1885, 162). Insisting on the necessity of custodial confinement—particularly for inmates of childbearing age—superintendents were hardly circumspect in their praise of inmates’ capacity for labor when retained under “careful protection and guardianship” (Wilbur Reference Wilbur1888, 110). Speaking at the 1885 National Conference of Charities and Correction, superintendent Isaac Kerlin boasted of the “four thousand dollars in wage labor annually saved” by the Pennsylvania Training School by using inmate labor, allowing “the institution to retain about thirty inmates on the non-paying list; that is, thirty free patients” (Reference Kerlin1885, 162, emphasis in original). Agreeing with Kerlin, Walter Fernald was careful to specify that any reduction in “the average running expenses of these institutions” achieved by the “utilization of the industrial abilities of the trained inmates” ought to be considered secondary to the therapeutic and moral benefits of their labor (Reference Fernald1893, 218–9). “These simple people,” he clarified, “are much happier and better off in every respect when they know they are doing some useful and necessary work” (Reference Fernald1893, 218). Nevertheless, the sheer scope of the tasks performed by inmates—including farming, groundskeeping, cooking, cleaning, sewing, laundry, and caregiving—suggests that the turn to inmate labor was not motivated purely by the need to give inmates “the impression that they…[were] accomplishing something” (Wilbur Reference Wilbur1877, 141, my emphasis). To the contrary, admitted Arthur Curtis Rogers, superintendent of the Minnesota School for the Feeble-Minded: “Scores of feeble-minded persons are to-day performing the work of regular employees in public institutions”—even, in some cases, building the institutions where they would be confined (Reference Rogers1888, 102).Footnote ¹⁰

The enthusiasm expressed by superintendents in promoting the productive capacities of their charges to trustees, donors, and state charity boards is belied, however, by their equally energetic attempts to discount inmates’ fitness for independence. Certainly, inmates were “practically useful and helpful,” but this conveyed little about their ability “to be safely trusted, either for their own good or the good of society, out from under…[the] strict and judicious surveillance” of the institution (Fernald Reference Fernald1892, 16; Rogers Reference Rogers1888, 103). Whereas the productive confinement of the Perkins workshop relied on a distinction between the ethic demanded of its workers and their utility, here we see a separation between the “productive value of [the] work performed” and inmates’ right to liberty (Kerlin Reference Kerlin1884, 252). Gone, in other words, was an earlier emphasis on industrial training as the key to securing the inmates’ eventual release. Instead, many superintendents saw labor as not only compatible with but even requisite for the “arbitrary but legal isolation of the unfit”—a way to keep inmates from “reproduc[ing] their kind” while also recovering some of the cost of their care (Kerlin Reference Kerlin1884, 257; Barr Reference Barr1902, 163). Very often it was the qualities believed to be characteristic of an inmate’s diagnosis that made them especially well suited to become “faithful domestics,” caregivers, or agricultural laborers in the institution (Winspear Reference Winspear1895, 163). For George H. Knight, the superintendent of the Connecticut School for Imbeciles, it was only by increasing inmate populations that institutions would be able to find willing caretakers for the “most unfortunate and helpless among the defective classes.” Indeed, “even for money,…[superintendents] cannot get suitable people who are willing to come in contact with the lowest grade in the right spirit,—a spirit which demands patience, cheerfulness, and affection.” The “imbecile,” on the other hand, “will share his pleasures and attainments with his weaker brother with a sense of high privilege in being allowed so to share it.” “None,” he continued, “make tenderer care-takers, nor, under supervision, more watchful ones” (Knight Reference Knight1892, 160).

The ease with which reformers could at once acknowledge the economic benefits reaped from the use of inmate labor and deny the possibility of those same inmates finding suitable competitive employment, was predicated on the assumption that their labor could only be extracted under certain conditions. “Outside of an institution,” Fernald asserted, “it would be impossible to secure the experienced and patient supervision and direction necessary to obtain practical, remunerative results from the comparatively unskilled labor of these feeble-minded people” (Reference Fernald1893, 218). Though perhaps “deft in handicraft,” inmates lacked the “higher powers of the intellect” necessary to navigate such a “busy, practical, money-getting age” in which even the “normal” worker was struggling to keep pace (Powell Reference Powell1898, 295; Rogers Reference Rogers1888, 102). Remarking on the unusual skill of a 16-year-old boy employed in the shoe shop of the Iowa Institution for Feeble-Minded Children, the Institution’s superintendent explained that it would be a mistake to presume (as some visitors apparently had) that “prodigies of this character are wrongfully detained” and ought therefore to be allowed their freedom (Powell Reference Powell1887, 256). Instead, it was incumbent upon the institution to cultivate and direct these abilities toward their desired (institutional) ends. Inmates, reformer Frederick H. Wines specified, were “useful under direction, just as a horse is. But you cannot make a horse useful except under direction….You may correct bad habits, you may develop and improve them; but they must remain under control, in order to be of any real service to the world” (Wines in response to Dechert Reference Dechert1889, 321).

Concerned as they were to justify the necessity of inmates’ long-term institutionalization and their need for “kindly but firm oversight and direction,” superintendents’ descriptions of inmate labor bear a striking resemblance to the ideal factory worker imagined by managers and efficiency experts during the same period (Fernald Reference Fernald1897, 16). But while inmates’ need for “intelligent direction” and “proper guardianship” was considered reason enough for their continued confinement (Kerlin Reference Kerlin1885, 160; Wilbur Reference Wilbur1888, 110), these same “mental and moral qualities” were also central to the success of new “scientific” management techniques (Taylor Reference Taylor1911a, 96). Consider the case of “Schmidt,” the yard worker at the Bethlehem Steel Company whose ability to load over 47 tons of pig iron per day (nearly three times the average loaded by his coworkers) figured prominently in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. Footnote ¹¹ Chosen from among 75-yard workers, Schmidt exemplified the characteristics necessary for withstanding the “grinding monotony” of pig-iron handling (Reference Taylor1911b, 59). Capable of “do[ing] exactly as he’s told from morning till night,” he was described by Taylor as being “so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type” (Reference Taylor1911b, 45, 59). And yet, far from being a detriment to his productivity, it was Schmidt’s stupidity—his mental “heav[iness]” and “sluggish[ness]”—that made him an ideal pig-iron handler (Reference Taylor1911b, 137, 46).

The pig-iron loading experiments undertaken by Taylor and his associates were meant to illustrate how even the most rudimentary tasks could be made more efficient through the application of scientific management techniques (Aitken Reference Aitken1960; Esch and Roediger Reference Esch and Roediger2009; Kanigel Reference Kanigel1997; Nelson Reference Nelson1977; Wrege and Perroni Reference Wrege and Perroni1974). Relying on the “substitution of a science for the individual judgment of the workman,” was, Taylor believed, the only effective way to overcome “soldiering”—the deliberate slowing-down that resulted when workers were left to “regulate…[their] own way of doing the work” (Reference Taylor1911b, 114, 63). Practically, it allowed employers to replace “more intelligent”—and higher paid—skilled mechanics with men like Schmidt, who, though “too stupid properly to train [themselves],” were capable of “promptly obey[ing] orders and instructions” without complaint (Reference Taylor1911b, 59, 63; Reference Taylor1911a, 139). Speaking to the proper relationship between management and labor under scientific management, Taylor was explicit: “All we want of…[the men] is to obey the orders we give them, do what we say, and do it quick” ([1907] Reference Taylor1995, 9).

And yet, scientific management was not just about improving efficiency or cutting costs. If Taylor’s pig-iron experiments “symbolized the development of modern business management” (Nelson Reference Nelson1977, 487), they were equally concerned with how best to secure workers’ “acquiescen[ce]” to this “new order” (Taylor Reference Taylor1911a, 132). The success of the planning departments charged with assuming the “brain work” of a particular task hinged on the worker’s ability to “receiv[e] and obey[] directions covering details, large and small, which in the past ha[d] been left to his individual judgment” (Reference Taylor1911a, 98, 133). Relinquishing control in this way demanded, Taylor wrote, “a complete revolution in…[the workers’] mental attitude toward their employers and their work” (Reference Taylor1911a, 130). To the extent that “Taylorism told workers not only what to do but exactly how to do it,” then, it required both physical capacity and compliance (Corwin Reference Corwin2003, 139, emphasis in original).

Insisting that workers were “not only willing, but glad” to “change from their old easy-going ways to a higher rate of speed,” Taylor nevertheless conceded that “a certain percentage” would resist these changes and need to be let go (Reference Taylor1911a, 25, 132). The notion that management would instruct the worker in “new working habits” was, he admitted further, “directly antagonistic to the…idea that each workman can best regulate his own way of doing the work” (Reference Taylor1911b, 63). In this regard, the “scientific selection of the workman” that Taylor espoused was as concerned with the workman’s ability to do the work as it was with his willingness to do it in the precise way set forth by management (Taylor Reference Taylor1911b, 43). Indeed, “the workman who is best suited” to a particular task, Taylor believed, was “incapable, either through lack of education or through insufficient mental capacity, of understanding th[e] science” behind its correct performance (Reference Taylor1911b, 97). “Entirely relieved of the work of planning,” Schmidt’s stupidity was a necessary condition of his success (Reference Taylor1911a, 98).

That a worker’s physical or “mental make-up” suited them to a particular task or profession was not a novel observation (Taylor Reference Taylor1911b, 59). Nor, as we have seen, were critics of the changes wrought by industrialization the first to express concern over its potentially degrading effects. Writing more than a century earlier, Adam Smith worried that the division of labor would, if left unchecked, result in the “corruption and degeneracy of the great body of the people” ([1776] Reference Smith and Cannan1976, 302). But what set Taylor and his contemporaries apart was their willingness to treat the “stupid and ignorant” laborer less as a regretful consequence of industrialization than as evidence of the successful fit between available manpower and the needs of a growing economy (Smith [1776] Reference Smith and Cannan1976, 303). Where critics of industrialization bemoaned the “purely mechanical and unintelligent character of much that…[was] required” of the new factory worker, proponents of scientific management were more concerned with selecting the best workers for a job (Potter Reference Potter1897, 388). Confronting the debilitating consequences of industrial production, management experts inverted the relationship between disability and laboring capacity, exposing an alternative ideal subtending the figure of the free, independent citizen-worker. Imagined as a “human machine”—capable and industrious, but also pliant and docile—this figure referenced its institutionalized counterpart, highlighting the tension between work as a constitutive element of democratic citizenship and the shifting demands of the new industrial order (Biggs Reference Biggs1996).

Viewed against the threat posed by mechanized and subdivided labor to the intelligence and skill of the worker, inmate labor emerges both as a response to the economic strain of growing institutional populations and as a bulwark against the degradation of labor by industrial capitalism. To this end, inmates’ lifelong confinement and segregation within the institution helped assuage mounting concerns about the changing conditions of work by obscuring the likeness between the “machine-like qualities characteristic of…the feeble-minded” and the traits required of the ideal industrial worker (Brown Reference Brown1886, 404).

Placing the increased dominance of wage labor alongside—rather than in opposition to—custodialization shows how these parallel histories worked together to uphold the vision of free labor against the rapidly shifting reality of waged work. Displaced by the rise of factory production, the independent citizen-worker gave way, over the course of the nineteenth century, to the tightly managed and fractionalized wage laborer. And it was amidst this “crisis of free labor” and the dissonance between an older labor ideal and the reality of wage labor, that the figure of the disabled worker emerged, serving as the unspoken background that both defined and delimited the semi-skilled industrial operative (Witt Reference Witt2001, 713; cf. Foner Reference Foner1994; Forbath Reference Forbath1985; Stanley Reference Stanley1998). At the same time that disabled workers were being excluded from the competitive labor force, in other words, it was the qualities that defined the exemplary worker within the custodial institution that were made central to creating a disciplined workforce.

“APPROXIMATELY USEFUL CITIZENS”: REFIGURING LABOR IN THE NEW CENTURYFootnote ¹²

Narrated as the gradual stigmatization of people with cognitive and physical abnormalities and their exclusion from the labor market, scholars often trace the emergence of contemporary understandings of disability to the transformations wrought by industrial capitalism (Gleeson Reference Gleeson1999; Oliver Reference Oliver and Barton1989; Rose Reference Rose2017; Ryan and Thomas Reference Ryan and Thomas1980). But the affinities between inmate and semi- and unskilled labor suggest an alternative account, in which the presence of—and institutional reliance upon—inmate labor helped preserve the myth of the free, independent citizen-worker against its erosion by industrialization. If advocates of scientific management like Taylor were more willing to acknowledge the conditions (both intellectual and functional) required of new work forms, some companies took this demand for an obedient and disciplined labor force to its logical conclusion, explicitly seeking out disabled workers on the assumption that their disabilities made them uniquely suited to the new industrial order. Although these practices were not widespread, they are nevertheless instructive for what they disclose about the changing norms of work at the turn of the twentieth century.

Challenging the presumption that illness and disability “ma[de] ordinary work out of the question” (Hall and Buck Reference Hall and Mertice1915, viii), managers who sought out disabled workers were often required to justify their hiring decisions, and it is here that the shifting terms of wage labor are made clear. Consider, for example, Joseph Goldberg’s insistence that “deaf-mutes” employed in the bottling department of his father’s New York City liquor store were “more faithful” and less given to “dissipation” than “men in possession of all their faculties” (New York Times 1907). Or the assertion by Reno, Nevada tailor H. N. Greenfield, that the “crippled worker is steady, competent, and ambitious,” and possessed none of the “migratory” tendencies that afflicted his able-bodied employees (Reno Gazette-Journal 1919). Notable in both cases is the emphasis on the dispositions and habits necessary for securing worker compliance with managerial oversight. Like Taylor’s attention to the worker’s “mental attitude”—and not just their efficiency or speed—Goldberg and Greenfield’s comments make legible the transformations demanded of low- and semi-skilled wage laborers as industrialization took hold. And, like inmate laborers within the custodial institution, it is the relative infrequency of these targeted hiring practices that make them such convenient repositories for broader worries about the changing nature of work at the turn of the century.

If Goldberg and Greenfield cited the reliability and loyalty of their disabled employees, it was also the case that companies would hire disabled workers on the assumption that their disabilities made them more productive, not less. Indeed, between 1916 and 1920, Firestone and Goodyear tire companies together employed over one thousand deaf workers, enough that a so-called Silent Colony was established near the companies’ headquarters in Akron, Ohio (Buchanan Reference Buchanan1999, 76–83; Schowe Reference Schowe1940). Driven in part by a wartime shortage of available manpower, these positions did not, for the most part, survive the post-war collapse of the rubber industry. Even still, the rhetoric surrounding the recruitment of deaf workers frequently cites their deafness as the reason for their efficiency and diligence. Neither easily distracted nor given to “needless conversation,” deaf workers were thought to be especially suited and even “favored” by what Benjamin Schowe—the manager (himself deaf) in charge of Firestone’s recruiting efforts—referred to as the “regimen…of mass production” (quoted in Morton Reference Morton, Bauman and Murray2014, 310; Schowe Reference SchoweN.d., 4).

Credited with being among “the sturdiest and the steadiest in the plant,” it was deaf workers’ loyalty and compliance as much as their efficiency that drove their increased employment (Indianapolis Star 1916; cf. New York Times 1907). Acknowledging the monotony of what often amounted to semi-skilled piecework, managers assumed that pervasive discrimination and a dearth of other employment opportunities would prevent deaf and disabled employees from participating in the kinds of labor unrest that characterized the early twentieth century (Schowe Reference SchoweN.d., 1). They would, in other words, be grateful for what work they were able to find. Reporting on Chicago’s Automatic Electric Company for the Silent Worker Magazine (a monthly, student-run newspaper published by the New Jersey School for the Deaf), one contributor suggested that when “given an opportunity to prove their ability, the deaf workmen are if anything even more industrious, reliable, quick to learn, and painstaking than their so-called more fortunate hearing brother” (The Silent Worker 1902, 49). Indeed, by 1903, the company had hired nearly 150 deaf workers after a more limited trial employment found that their dexterity gave them a particular advantage in assembling “the delicate mechanism of the modern telephone” (New York Times 1905).

Valuable, too, was the deaf worker’s superior focus and attentiveness. As one “manager Keith” explained to a reporter from the St. Paul Globe, “We find [deaf mutes to be]…better workmen than a good many men who have all other senses. They attend strictly to their own business.” Able-bodied boys and men, on the other hand, “play too much.” It was for this reason, he continued, that companies like Automatic Electric had “replac[ed] all…[their] boys with these able substitutes” (St. Paul Globe 1903). F. L. Avant, the general superintendent of the Curlee Clothing Company in St. Louis, reached a similar conclusion. “The deaf mutes,” he observed, “do not hang around the water coolers and talk as much as others do; they are not eternally ‘spoofing’ at one another, but they go along hour in and hour out, paying attention only to their work, undistracted by anything in the plant” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch 1921).

Unfortunately for Keith, the diligence and reliability of the deaf Automatic Electric employees proved short-lived. On April 22, 1903, 150 deaf employees joined the Telephone and Switchboard Workers’ Union strike in support of a shorter, 9-hour workday (Chicago Tribune 1903). Expressing a mixture of shock and amused bewilderment, the Chicago Daily Tribune declared it “the quietest strike on record,” noting the incongruity of the “enthusiastic but noiseless” picketers lining Morgan and Van Buren Streets. Although the company agreed to the union’s demands, this victory was bittersweet. By joining their hearing colleagues in the week-long strike, these “speechless but gesticulating” workers had shattered the illusion of their solitary diligence (Chicago Daily Tribune 1903). By the following year, only around 30 deaf employees remained at the company (Rose Reference Rose2017, 120).

What are we to make of these cases? Exceptions to the widespread exclusion of disabled people from the workforce, they might be dismissed as anomalies in a period better known for its preoccupation with organizational efficiency and new techniques of managerial control. Certainly, disabled workers addressed some of these concerns—being at times more attentive, reliable, and industrious than their nondisabled counterparts—but in many respects, they remained largely unfitted for the speed and intensity of new labor forms. Illustrating the lengths companies were willing to go to maintain productive capacity and avoid labor unrest, these examples do not fundamentally challenge the more widespread exclusion of people with disabilities from paid employment.

But here I want to suggest an alternative account, one that treats disability—and specifically the disabled worker—as a locus through which the contradictions between earlier visions of free labor and the dawning reality of industrial production, might be resolved. Put differently, rather than viewing the targeted hiring of disabled workers by companies such as Automatic Electric, Goodyear, and Firestone as aberrations within a longer arc of disability exclusion, we might see them instead as offering a lens onto the shifting meaning of work and labor at the dawn of the twentieth century. Placing the demand for willing and obedient workers into stark relief, these examples illustrate the effort involved in upholding the ideals of liberty and independence that continued to animate understandings of free labor (Forbath Reference Forbath1985; Glickman Reference Glickman1997; Gourevitch Reference Gourevitch2015). If disability was “becoming inextricably linked with personal immorality and economic dependency,” it was characteristics that had long defined abnormal bodies and minds—docility, passivity, simplicity—that were called upon to shore up the fantasy of the free, independent laborer against the threat posed by industrial capitalism (Rose Reference Rose2017, 4). Coinciding with the exclusion of people with disabilities from the paid workforce and their widespread confinement in custodial institutions, it was this relative invisibility and marginality that obscured their figuration in the low- and semi-skilled wage laborer.

Surfacing the affinities between the qualities required of low- and semi-skilled wage laborers and characteristics that, in a different setting, were signs of degeneracy, constitutional abnormality, and feeblemindedness, also contributes to scholarship that has sought to explain how American workers came to terms with wage labor. Citing the emergence of consumer society and the veneration of contract in the postbellum period, Lawrence Glickman (Reference Glickman1997) and Amu Dru Stanley (Reference Stanley1998) chart the shift from thinking of wage work as “a dangerous, demeaning, and debilitating departure from traditional modes of financial reward” (Glickman Reference Glickman1997, 1), to a “voluntary relation[] of exchange” that was compatible with—and even emblematic of—autonomy and freedom (Stanley Reference Stanley1998, 4; cf. Forbath Reference Forbath1985; Rodgers Reference Rodgers2014; Shklar Reference Shklar1991). “This change in perspective,” as Glickman observes, “was born of necessity.” Faced with the dominance of wage labor and a legal landscape increasingly hostile to labor organizing, workers “learned to accept wages and to identify themselves as wage earners because they had no alternative” (Reference Glickman1997, 2). At the same time, the abolition of slavery and the equation of freedom with contract and self-ownership offered a conceptual vocabulary by which even wage labor could be construed as free. But tensions remained between the exploitative and unequal dimensions of wage labor and the belief that work was not just necessary for—but also central to—the full exercise of citizenship.

Attending to the role of disability within these narratives, both its explicit appearance in the disabled worker and its rhetorical invocation in debates over new managerial techniques, testifies to the energy required to uphold work as “an essential element of citizenship” (Shklar Reference Shklar1991, 68). Even if “wage earners…had no alternative” but to accede to wage labor, maintaining a belief in work as both necessary and civically meaningful required a good deal of mythmaking about the conditions and rewards of wage labor (Glickman Reference Glickman1997, 2). At once shoring up the free labor ideal and serving as its antithesis, the disabled worker exposed the instabilities in the meaning of work at a moment of extraordinary social, political, and economic change. Whether laboring within the custodial institution or gainfully employed as more dedicated, loyal, and efficient “substitutes” for their able-bodied peers, these workers helped sustain the ideal of free labor even as they revealed fissures in its central presumptions. It was the liminal place of the disabled worker—neither wholly excluded from, nor entirely suitable for, paid employment—that made them such fertile sites for negotiating the boundaries and defining features of work.