Many progressive reformers in the mid-1800s noticed the horrible conditions experienced by people with disabilities and wanted to improve them.
Dorothea Dix described:More than nine-thousand idiots, epileptics, and insane in these United States, destitute of appropriate care and protection.
Bound with galling chains, bowed beneath fetters and heavy iron balls, attached to drag-chains, lacerated with ropes, scourged with rods, and terrified beneath storms of profane execrations and cruel blows; now subject to jibes, and scorn, and torturing tricks, now abandoned to the most loathsome necessities or subject to the vilest and most outrageous violations.
[1]Samuel Gridley-Howe and other reformers wanted to establish training schools where people with intellectual disabilities could learn and be prepared for society.
People often used the term "feeble-minded" which could apply to both intellectual and developmental disabilities and mental illness, or in some cases, perceived sexual promiscuity.
This state school aimed to educate children with intellectual disabilities and was reportedly successful in doing so.
Rather than preparing students to join the community, these schools only trained people to do work in an institution setting.
Scientists and doctors became much less concern with teaching or training people with disabilities and focused more on separating them from society, stopping them from reproducing, and in some cases, advocating for their murder.
In 1913 the United States Public Health Service administered the newly invented Binet IQ test to immigrants arriving at Ellis Island.
Dr. Henry Goddard, a psychologist at Vineland Training School in New Jersey, wrote a book claiming that they investigated the family history of a woman at the institution and demonstrated that "feeble-mindedness" was genetic and caused all of social ills.
They are multiplying at twice the rate of the general population, and not until we recognize this fact, and work on this basis, will we begin to solve [our] social problems.
Superintendents, concerned about overcrowding and of the "threat" of people with disabilities having children, started to sterilize the inmates.
US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously declared "three generations of imbeciles are enough!
"[1] American eugenicists would go onto serve as a model for Nazi Germany to replicate as they sought to institutionalize, sterilize, and murder the "undesirables" in their own country.