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The Race for Rehabilitation: Sign-Mime, the National Theatre of the Deaf, and Cold War Internationalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 December 2022
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In 1967, the US Vocational Rehabilitation Administration (VRA) awarded $331,000 to the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theatre Foundation to fund a new company, the National Theatre of the Deaf. Endowing such an enterprise was bold, but not entirely unprecedented for this federal agency tasked with restoring disabled Americans to productive employment. Founded in 1920, the federal–state vocational rehabilitation program, or VR, ascended to institutional and ideological prominence during World War II and maintained this position well into the 1960s and beyond. VR distinguished itself not only through positing competitive employment as the solution to disabled Americans’ dependence on the state, but the specific means through which it would restore the disabled to productivity: the multidisciplinary expertise of physicians, psychologists, physical therapists, and rehabilitation counselors who collectively sought to render rehabilitants employable through a series of therapeutic interventions. Whereas disability activists focused on combatting the structural barriers disabled workers experienced in the labor market, “rehabilitationists” emphasized the imperative for disabled people to acclimate to existing work environments through individual physical and psychological transformation.
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- Copyright © The Authors, 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.
Footnotes
This article is based in part on Chapter 2 of my Disability Works: US Performance after Rehabilitation (NYU Press, forthcoming). This essay's title, “The Race for Rehabilitation,” echoes David Serlin's phrasing in Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 54–5.
References
Endnotes
1 Lewis Funke, “New Theater of Deaf Prepares a Sampler for TV,” New York Times, 9 March 1967, 79.
2 For consistency and clarity, I use Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) to refer to the entirety of the operations of the federal–state rehabilitation program—and its attendant discourses, practices, and institutions—across its changing names and organizational structures: Office of Vocational Rehabilitation (OVR), 1951–63; Vocational Rehabilitation Administration (VRA), 1963–7; Social Rehabilitation Service (SRS), 1967–77).
3 I borrow the term “rehabilitationists” from Edward D. Berkowitz's Disabled Policy: America's Programs for the Handicapped (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For an account of the struggle between rehabilitationists and organized labor in the making of disability employment policy, see Audra Jennings's remarkable Out of the Horrors of War: Disability Politics in World War II America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
4 In keeping with VR's construction of deafness as a medical problem to be solved, rather than a cultural identity, most of the company's early records refer to “deafness,” not “Deafness,” and I follow that convention here. While many NTD members identified with and made their way to the company via Deaf culture, NTD's relationship with cultural Deafness is hardly straightforward. On the impossibility of a deaf–Deaf distinction resolving these complexities, see Brueggemann, Brenda Jo, Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places (New York: NYU Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 For an account of deaf Americans’ pursuit of citizenship through work in the preceding decades, see Octavian Elijah Robinson, “The Deaf Do Not Beg: Making the Case for Citizenship, 1880–1956” (Ph.D. diss., Graduate Program in History, Ohio State University, 2012), <URL>https://etd.ohiolink.edu<EN>, accessed 11 November 2021.
6 Bernard Bragg to David Hays, 28 October 1966, Box 1, Folder 3, Bernard Bragg Collection, 1951–2008 (hereinafter BBC), Deaf Studies Archive, Rochester Institute of Technology/National Technical Institute of the Deaf (hereinafter RIT/NTID), Rochester, NY.
7 Gannon, Jack R., Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America (1981; Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2012), 222CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jennings, Out of the Horrors of War.
8 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey,” <URL>https://data.bls.gov<EN>, accessed 15 December 2021; Tip Sheet for Mary E. Switzer, 6 July 1966, NAD Workshop to Activate Interpreting Services for the Deaf, 9–11 July 1966, San Francisco, CA, Box 35, Folder 320, Mary Elizabeth Switzer Papers, 1922–1973 (hereinafter MES), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
9 Gannon, Deaf Heritage, 255–9.
10 “U.S. Office of Vocational Rehabilitation Publishes Survey of Deaf Peddlers,” The Companion 91.8 (1966), School for the Deaf, Faribault, MN, Box 5, Folder 2, BBC.
11 Tip Sheet for Switzer, NAD Workshop.
12 Baynton, Douglas C., Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
13 Hamraie, Aimi, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 10Google Scholar.
14 Polyanovksy, Max, “The Moscow Theater of the Deaf,” American Annals of the Deaf 83.4 (1938): 320–2Google Scholar.
15 Shaw, Claire L., Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917–1991 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 132CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Mary E. Switzer, “Address.” In “President's Committee on Employment of the Physically Handicapped: Minutes of the Annual Meeting” (1960): 110–14, at 112, Box 68, Folder 713, MES.
17 Bernard Bragg, as signed to Eugene Bergman, Lessons in Laughter: An Autobiography of a Deaf Actor (1989; Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2002), 152.
18 Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York and London: New Press, 1999).
19 “A Tribute to Bernard Bragg,” Deaf Life (February 1989), Box 6, Folder 2, BBC.
20 Bernard Bragg, “Analysis: The Anatomy of Sign-Mime (A Search for Artform),” in “Three-Week Course in Sign-Mime Acting (Externals)” (ca. 1967), 1–4, at 1–2, Box 10, Folder 2, BBC.
21 Bernard Bragg to David Hays, 17 August 1966, Box 1, Folder 2, BBC.
22 David Hays to Bernard Bragg, 10 June 1966, Box 1, Folder 2, BBC; “Growth of Deaf Theatres Here and Abroad,” Spotlight (1979–80 Tour), Box 2, Folder 7, BBC.
23 Hays to Bragg, 10 June 1966; Bernard Bragg to David Hays, 21 June 1966, Box 1, Folder 2, BBC.
24 Stephen C. Baldwin, Pictures in the Air: The Story of the National Theatre of the Deaf (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press), 17.
25 “Suggestions for the Questionnaire,” Box 1, Folder 2, BBC; emphasis original.
26 David Hays to Bernard Bragg and Gene Lasko, 26 November 1966, Box 1, Folder 3, BBC.
27 Bragg to Hays, 21 June 1966, Box 1, Folder 2, BBC.
28 Douglas Burke to David Hays, 7 September 1966, Box 1, Folder 2, BBC.
29 Christopher Krentz, Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
30 Mike Gulliver, “The Emergence of International Deaf Spaces in France from Desloges 1779 to the Paris Congress of 1900,” in It's a Small World: International Deaf Spaces and Encounters, ed. Michele Friedner and Annelies Kusters (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2015), 3–14, at 4.
31 Bernard Bragg, “A Word on Universal Non-Verbal Communication,” July 1966, Box 1, Folder 2, BBC.
32 Onno Crasborn and Anja Hiddinga, “The Paradox of International Sign: The Importance of Deaf–Hearing Encounters for Deaf–Deaf Communication across Sign Language Borders,” in It's a Small World, ed. Friedner and Kusters, 59–69, at 63 (where they quote Green, “Building the Tower of Babel,” 460; see note 35 below).
33 Ibid., 60.
34 Ibid., 61.
35 Ibid., 65; Bill Moody (1989) qtd. in Green, E. Mara, “Building the Tower of Babel: International Sign, Linguistic Commensuration, and Moral Orientation,” Language in Society 43.4 (2014): 445–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 450.
36 Proceedings of the Second World Congress of the Deaf, qtd. in Jack R. Gannon, World Federation of the Deaf: A History (Silver Spring, MD: National Association of the Deaf, 2011), 23.
37 Bill Moody (1989) qtd. in Green, “Building the Tower of Babel,” 451.
38 Gannon, World Federation of the Deaf, 121.
39 Bill Moody (1989) qtd. in Green, “Building the Tower of Babel,” 450.
40 Mary E. Switzer, “Role We Should Play in the Forthcoming World Federation of the Deaf Meeting in Wiesbaden, to Which Mr. [Boyce] Williams Is Going,” 2 June 1959, Box 66, Folder 692, MES.
41 Bragg to Hays, 17 August 1966, Box 1, Folder 2, BBC.
42 Bragg, “Thoughts for Sign-Mime Theatre of the Deaf,” 22 August 1966, Box 1, Folder 2, BBC.
43 Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity, ed. H.-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
44 Bragg, “Introduction,” in “Three-Week Course,” n.p.
45 Bragg, “Thoughts for Sign-Mime Theatre.”
46 David Hays to Bernard Bragg, 31 August 1966, Box 1, Folder 2, BBC.
47 Switzer qtd. in “The National Theatre of the Deaf,” Rehabilitation Record, July–August 1969, 20, Box 5, Folder 2, BBC.
48 Mary E. Switzer, “Rehabilitation as a Force in International Relations,” Remarks at President's Committee on Employment of the Physically Handicapped Annual Meeting, 6 May 1960, Box 24, Folder 239, MES.
49 Switzer, “Rehabilitation as a Force in International Relations”; Mary E. Switzer, “International Research and Activities on Behalf of Blind Persons,” Remarks at the Second Asian Conference on Work for the Blind, Kuala Lumpur, Federation of Malaya, 20–31 May 1963, Box 69, Folder 717, MES.
50 Mary E. Switzer, “Commissioner's Letter 66-2,” 23 July 1965, Box 3, Folder 27, MES; Mary E. Switzer, “Assessment: Capacity for Useful Living,” May 1962, Box 68, Folder 714, MES.
51 Mary E. Switzer, “Rehabilitation as a National Policy,” Remarks at Second National Vocational Rehabilitation Conference, Tel Aviv, 10 December 1962, Box 66, Folder 698, MES.
52 Mary E. Switzer, “Miss Switzer's Report to Staff on December 31, 1962: Trip to Israel,” 31 December 1962, Box 66, Folder 698, MES.
53 McRuer, Robert, “Disability Nationalism in Crip Times,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4.2 (2010): 163–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
54 Switzer, “Rehabilitation as a National Policy,” 6.
55 Switzer, “Rehabilitation as a Force in International Relations,” 1.
56 Mary E. Switzer, “Director's Letter Number 164: Eighth World Congress of the International Society for the Welfare of Cripples, New York City, August 28–September 2, 1960,” Box 3, Folder 24, MES; Mary E. Switzer, “Director's Letter Number 62-2: Proceedings of the 8th World Congress for Rehabilitation of the Disabled (formerly for the Welfare of Cripples),” 10 August 1961, Box 3, Folder 25, MES.
57 Switzer, “Rehabilitation as a National Policy,” 15.
58 Mary E. Switzer to [Connecticut] Governor Ribicoff, “The International Activities of the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation,” 28 December 1960, Box 5, Folder 52, MES.
59 Mary E. Switzer, “Rehabilitation in Today's World,” 11, 11 June 1959, Box 66, Folder 690, MES; Switzer, “Rehabilitation as a National Policy,” 14.
60 Charlotte M. Canning, On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 194.
61 Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 4.
62 Saunders, Cultural Cold War, 108.
63 Canning, On the Performance Front, 15.
64 Ibid., 225–6.
65 Aimi Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 10.
66 Thomas F. DeFrantz, Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 59–60.
67 See Dennis Tyler, Disabilities of the Color Line: Redressing Antiblackness from Slavery to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2022).
68 Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, 149.
69 Baldwin, “Appendix E: NTD Foreign Tours from 1969 to 1992,” in Pictures in the Air, 135.
70 David Hays to Mary E. Switzer, 23 June 1969, Box 46, Folder 417, MES.
71 Ibid.
72 Canning, On the Performance Front, 15, 13.
73 Shaw, Deaf in the USSR, 132.
74 Ibid., 133.
75 Ibid., 129.
76 Canning, On the Performance Front, 13.
77 Shaw, Deaf in the USSR, 17, 127.
78 Linda Cook qtd. in ibid., 150.
79 Ibid., 3–8, at 3.
80 Ibid., 10.
81 Helen Powers, Signs of Silence: Bernard Bragg and the National Theatre of the Deaf (New York: Dodd Mead, 1972), 166–7.
82 Bragg and Bergman, Lessons in Laughter, 123–4.
83 David Hays to Vladimir Fufaev, 4 June 1973, Box 7, Folder 1, BBC.
84 “NTD Opens Exchange with Moscow Theatre: U.S. & Russian Deaf Professional Theatres Are the Only Two of a Kind,” Silent News 6.10 (October 1974), Box 6, Folder 8, BBC.
85 Bragg and Bergman, Lessons in Laughter, 124. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.
86 Bernard Bragg, “The Iron Curtain Rises: A Preview,” Spotlight (Spring 1973): 6, Box 2, Folder 7, BBC, including Hays quote.
87 Ibid.
88 Bess Williamson, Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 58.
89 Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (New York: Hill & Wang, 2013), 39.
90 Kim, Jina B., “Cripping the Welfare Queen: The Radical Potential of Disability Politics,” Social Text 39.3 (2021): 79–101, at 81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
91 “Biographical Information: Mary E. Switzer, Administrator,” 6, Box 1, Folder 1, MES.
92 Mary E. Switzer, “The Image of Welfare—1968,” 3, American Public Welfare Association Speech, 8 December 1967, Box 38, Folder 337, MES.
93 Mary E Switzer, “Rehabilitation,” interjection to be presented when appropriate during the UN Conference of Ministers Responsible for Social Welfare, 3 September 1968, Box 40, Folder 350, MES.
94 Switzer qtd. in “For Release in A.M. Papers,” 8 March 1968, Box 38, Folder 341, MES.
95 Jonathan Spivak, “Welfare's Diligent Disciple of Work,” Wall Street Journal, 13 June 1968, Box 71, Folder 783, MES.
96 Ibid., including Switzer quote.
97 David Hays to Bernard Bragg, 25 October 1966, Box 1, Folder 3, BBC.
98 Bragg to Hays, 28 October 1966, Box 1, Folder 3, BBC.
99 Susan Burch, Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 37.
100 Ibid., 39.
101 O'Neill Center's The National Theatre of the Deaf 10th Anniversary, 1967–1977, National Theatre of the Deaf annual reports and players’ guides, Box 1, RIT/NTID Deaf Studies Archive.
102 Gerard G. Walter, “Characteristics of Programs Serving Deaf Persons,” in Deaf Students in Postsecondary Education, ed. Susan B. Foster and Gerard G. Walter (New York: Routledge, 1992), 24–38, at 29.
103 Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, 90.
104 Paige McGinley, “A ‘Southern, Brown, Burnt Sensibility,’” in Creating and Consuming the American South, ed. Martyn Bone, Brian Ward, and William A. Link (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2015), 226–47, at 226.
105 Ibid., 227; 239.
106 Ibid., 228; 232.
107 Ibid., 227.
108 David Hays, “Four Saints in Three Acts by Gertrude Stein with music by Virgil Thomson,” in O'Neill Center's The National Theatre of the Deaf, RIT/NTID Deaf Studies Archive.
109 O'Neill Center's The National Theatre of the Deaf, RIT/NTID Deaf Studies Archive.
110 Bragg and Bergman, Lessons in Laughter, 150–1.
111 Ibid, 151.
112 Bragg and Bergman, Lessons in Laughter, 152–9; quotes on 157, 159.
113 Denis, Taras B., “For Bernard Bragg, the World's a Stage. . . ,” Deaf American 30.2 (October 1977): 19Google Scholar, Box 6, Folder 8, BBC.
114 “Bernard Bragg on World Tour,” Daily Texan, 23 February 1978, Box 6, Folder 8, BBC.
115 Bragg and Bergman, Lessons in Laughter, 158. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.