Wilbur Samuel Jackman

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Mental Retardation, a term adopted by educators and physicians to explain intellectual disabilities.From the Colonial Era to the Civil War, Americans distinguished between two types of mental limitations: “idiocy” and “imbecility.” Idiocy identified people who appeared to function with very low intellectual ability. Imbecility labeled individuals who seemed to have higher abilities than idiots, but still appeared disabled.

Beginning in the 1840s, American physicians Samuel Gridley Howe, Hervey Wilbur, and others read reports of the techniques of the French educator Edouard Séguin in training idiots. Encouraged by Séguin's success, these reformers founded private schools and public asylums for people with intellectual disability. Established for education, these facilities by the 1850s were housing graduates who had failed to find employment in their communities. By the 1870s, many states were transforming such schools into custodial institutions for the “feebleminded.” Although they continued to provide classroom instruction, by 1900 most institutions had become fully custodial.

The new century marked the beginning of special education and the eugenics movement. Special education provided schooling to “mentally defectives.” Henry H. Goddard's 1905 adaptation of the Binet intelligence tests launched a movement to identify intellectual disability among American grade schoolers and other groups such as World War I draftees. Paralleling the introduction of testing, the eugenics movement linked intellectual limitations with heredity and “bad breeding.” In 1914, the Committee on Provision for the Feebleminded launched a nationwide campaign against the “menace of the feebleminded.” Invoking the authority of eugenics, the committee promoted involuntary sterilization, institutional segregation, and laws to restrict marriage.

The Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II marked a period of underfunding and overcrowding of public institutions. Exposés that appeared during and after the war focused attention on the inhuman conditions of institutions housing the “mentally deficient.” Nevertheless, these facilities continued to grow until the mid‐1960s, when their populations reached over 190,000 residents. Beginning in the later 1960s, the efforts of two groups led to the rapid depopulation of the state institutions. These groups comprised civil libertarians critical of overcrowded institutions and state governments interested in transferring the costs of care to the federal Medicaid system. Both the civil libertarians and the funding provisions of the Medicaid program encouraged states to reduce the populations of their facilities. Policy‐makers called the strategy deinstitutionalization. The populations of state institutions steadily declined from the 1970s on, and by the end of the century most people labeled intellectually disabled lived independently, in group homes, or in community facilities.
See also Civil Liberties; Intelligence, Concepts of; Medicare and Medicaid; Mental Health Institutions.

Bibliography

Philip M. Ferguson , Abandoned to Their Fate: Social Policy and Practice toward Severely Retarded People in America, 1820–1920, 1994.
James W. Trent Jr. , Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States, 1994.

James W. Trent Jr.

Wilbur Samuel Jackman 1855–1907, American educator, b. Mechanicstown, Ohio, grad. Harvard, 1884. Jackman was a leader of the nature study movement in elementary schools. He taught (after 1889) at the Cook County Normal School in Chicago and, beginning with Nature Study for the Common Schools (1891), wrote texts and manuals. He was appointed dean of the new college of education in the Univ. of Chicago in 1901, but resigned in 1904 to become principal of the University Elementary School and to edit the Elementary School Teacher.