INTRODUCTION
Mickey’s Harvest: A Deaf Life in Early Twentieth-Century America
Deaf poet, screenplay writer, and novelist Howard L. Terry wrote Mickey’s Harvest: A Novel of a Deaf Boy’s Checkered Life between the years of 1917 and 1922 and then revised and donated it as an unpublished work to the Gallaudet College Library in 1951. Terry, a prolific writer, wrote on the cover of his manuscript that this was the “ final version, yet it could be greatly improved. ” Loosely framed as a diary, this novel describes the many adventures and travails of Mickey Dunmore, a young man who becomes deaf at the age of twelve after a near-drowning at sea. Orphaned and then adopted by a kindly nurse and her family, Mickey learns what he calls “ the sign language ” at a school for the deaf in the fictional town of Rosemont, New York. He then attends an unnamed college for deaf students in Washington, DC, a school that is readily recognizable as Gallaudet College (now University). After some time at the college, Mickey and a classmate leave the school and work their way west, stopping in different “ deaf colonies ” in cities and towns along the way whenever their money runs out. After dramatic adventures in both deaf and hearing communities across early twentieth-century America, the second half of the novel describes Mickey’s young-adult life in San Francisco, California, where he works to establish himself as a deaf writer and courts Marion Carrel, a “ deaf beauty ” who had been shut away from society by her eugenicist grandfather.
When the Great War of 1914–1918 intervenes, the diary ends and Mickey goes missing. The novel picks back up with an update of what happened to him during those war years, and then closes with his return to California and to “ Deafdom, ” his community of Deaf artists.*
Set in the early years of the twentieth century, this novel is at times an exciting adventure tale, and at other times a somber reflection, in narrative form, on the many challenges facing deaf individuals and the Deaf community at that time. These challenges include the effects of eugenics and commonly held ideas about “ deaf genes, ” discriminatory policies and proposed legislation banning deaf people from driving or from working in specific settings, stereotyped attitudes and their effect on employment of young able-bodied Deaf men, the costs of oralism and what Mickey’s friend calls “ the wrecked brain, ” the difficulties of getting insurance, the struggle of Deaf men in the business side of the artistic professions, peddling and the negative effects of deaf imposterism, the exploitation of deaf people in settings as varied as the circus and in the movies, and deaf victims of family shame. It is also a romance between seemingly star-crossed young lovers, both deaf, both latecomers to the white Deaf community at the time. It is the story of one relatively late-deafened young man’s journey into white Deaf communities and networks—including the community newspapers that comprised the “ Little Paper Family ”— of that era.
This novel presents a fascinating and revealing glimpse into the lives of young deaf, educated, white men, especially those who entered the Deaf community relatively late and those with artistic aspirations, in the years before the First World War. These issues and experiences are compounded by the larger social problems of that era, including labor troubles, riots by miners in the Western states, “ panicky Wall Street ” and bank failures due to speculation. Several characters in the novel are modeled after real-life Deaf community leaders and artists, men who were Terry’s friends and acquaintances. With their permission, sculptor Douglas Tilden and painter Granville Redmond served as the models for Dermit and Edsum, and activist, writer, and poet J. Frederick “ Jimmy ” Meagher was the model for anti-imposter advocate “ Bunny. ”1
Terry, in the foreword to the manuscript, notes that a “ great deal of the story has background in fact, but the opening chapter and that one about the Lady in the Jar [a circus scene from chapter 9] are fictional. ” Terry is clear that the “ hero of this story is not to be taken as a prototype of the average deaf youth. ” He writes, “ ‘ Mickey ’ Dunmore is a creation of my own through whom I have endeavored to bring out the problems of deafness and the struggles of the deaf. ” He also stated in a letter to Gallaudet College president Dr. Leonard Elstad that “ my purpose was to write a story so interesting that it would hold the reader to the end while he was learning a lot about deafness and the problems of the deaf. ”2
As such, this novel should be read as a narrative exploration of a particular Deaf identity and history, a late-deafened young white man’s emerging sense of Deaf identity, community, art, and labor in early twentieth-century America. This introduction provides details from Howard L. Terry’s life and work and touches on some key literary and historical issues relevant to this novel. Historians Susan Burch, Octavian Robinson, Brian Greenwald, John Vickrey Van Cleve, Douglas Baynton, and Robert Buchanan have written extensively about Deaf communities in the early decades of the twentieth century; their research on early twentieth-century Deaf communities, labor, eugenics, deaf imposters and peddlers, and the effects of stigma and stereotyping should be read in tandem with this manuscript. Additionally, the scholarship on deaf identity and dysconscious audism will likely help readers frame and elucidate the late-deafened narrator’s emerging sense of self and identity within the Deaf community.
A Brief Biography of Howard L. Terry
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1877, young Howard Leslie Terry had difficulties with his eyesight and progressively became deaf throughout his childhood. After the death of his mother in 1888, eleven-year-old Howard and his father—also a writer—moved to Collinsville, Illinois. As recounted in his poem, “ The Old Homestead, ” Terry’s young life was shadowed by his mother’s death, his subsequent move to his widowed aunt’s house, and his awareness of increasing hearing loss. A precocious writer, Terry began writing “ Half-a-Penny Tales ” at the age of twelve on a toy typewriter; later, Terry’s father published a collection of fourteen-year-old Howard’s poems. Terry left the Midwest to attend Gallaudet College in 1895, where he learned sign language. While at Gallaudet, he continued to write and publish, including in the student newspaper, The Buff and Blue. However, Terry left after two years because of difficulties with his eyesight.3
In 1901, Terry married fellow Gallaudet student Alice Taylor (1878-1950), a young woman who also became a prolific writer and activist in her own right. They farmed in Missouri until 1910, when they moved with their three children to California. Primarily known and celebrated for his poetry, Terry also published fiction, “ photoplays, ” editorials, and features in both deaf and hearing periodicals around the nation. A novel, A Voice from the Silence: A Story of the Ozarks (1914), was optioned by a Hollywood film studio, but was never made into a film, and the book was eventually republished as Man of the Soil.4 Terry regularly published his poetry, excerpts from his longer pieces and novels, short biographies of literary figures, character sketches, and editorials in Deaf periodicals.
Throughout their lives, Howard and Alice Taylor Terry were both actively involved in state, regional, and national organizations for Deaf people. Terry clearly drew on some of his experiences in this manuscript. For one, his narrator Mickey attends a “ convention of my people ” in a Colorado city, and Terry himself attended the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) convention in 1910, in Colorado Springs, CO. Additionally, as head of the association’s Literary Bureau, Terry actively participated in the 1915 NAD convention in San Francisco, CA.
In his role as Director of the NAD Literary Bureau, Terry reviewed and clipped literary portrayals of deaf people in leading magazines of the day. Whenever these portrayals proved to be “ misleading the public as to the possibilities of lip-reading, ” he wrote letters and editorials to publishers and magazines. One such case was the popular “ Judith Lee ” stories by British author Richard Marsh; Judith Lee was a schoolteacher, a hearing child of deaf adults, and an amateur sleuth who was also a “ wonderful lip-reader, ” a skill that she used to solve crimes. In his letters to writers such as Jack London and Mary Roberts Rinehart and in his editorials, Terry argued that “ the deaf themselves should write about the deaf. ”5
In addition to correcting popular and literary misapprehensions that were likely to “ injure the deaf, ” Terry advocated for journalistic and creative writing training for deaf writers.6 He encouraged Gallaudet College to offer courses in different kinds of writing even though, according to Terry, the school’s perspective was that there was “ no money in it. ” However, Terry wrote, “ writers write and you can’t stop them. ”7 “ Literary talent, ” Terry wrote, “ is not lacking in the deaf, but proper training is, and I believe there is a good field for the deaf with a bent for writing. ”8
Despite his skill and experience as a writer, Terry faced difficulties when it came time to send out this manuscript to publishers. In letters to Elstad, Terry wrote that he had sent out the manuscript to multiple publishing companies, including Macmillan, Harper’s, Frederick Stokes, and Doubleday. He noted that these companies had taken an interest, but they felt that this novel, being a “ special subject, ” had limited “ market value. ”9
Aside from the difficulties with finding a publisher for Mickey’s Harvest, Terry continued to be a prolific author; he was published widely and was invited to become editor of Poetry World. However he declined, citing his eyesight as the reason. In 1938, Gallaudet College awarded him a “ dean of deaf letters, ” an honorary degree,10 and in 1940, he was named to “ Who’s Who Among American Authors. ” While he did not self-identify as being a DeafBlind person, Terry was learning how to use a cane by the time he donated this manuscript to Gallaudet University in 1951.11 Terry died in 1964.
“ The Deaf Do Not Beg ”: Imposters, Education, and Employment
In Mickey’s Harvest, a “ deaf-mute imposter ” serves as the novel’s central villain: Mrs. Raleigh, the “ She-Mute Beggar Queen ” who infiltrates numerous Deaf communities. Terry’s contemporaries knew quite a bit about imposterism. Even as early as 1891, community newspapers wearily made note of “ another fraud on the public ” in the form of hearing people pretending to be deaf for the purposes of charity. In the early decades of the twentieth century, “ tramps and artificial deafness, ” or deaf-mute imposterism, were the subject of many editorials, letters, and features in the NAD’s periodical, The Deaf-Mutes Journal, and in community newspapers such as The Silent Worker.12
Imposters were by and large, hearing people pretending to be deaf and preying on public sympathy through begging or peddling. Peddlers often sold cheap items and capitalized on public sympathy by framing themselves as objects of charity. By posing as uneducated, poor members of society in need of a handout, imposters fostered the image of Deaf people as incapable and dependent. This public perception of Deaf people went directly at odds with the able-bodied ideal that the community wanted to put forth to the public at large.13
“ When you see a ‘ deaf ’ beggar you can make up your mind that he is not deaf. The deaf do not beg, ” stated a writer in a 1909 editorial to the Silent Worker; and later, an editorialist to the same paper wrote that “ the deaf cannot stand by idly and permit more disgrace and abuse to be heaped on others as well as themselves and bring an entire class of ambitious and law-abiding citizens into contempt. ”14 In everyday life, deaf-mute imposters rarely impinged directly upon the lives of Deaf Americans, but Deaf citizens often felt the negative aftereffects of the stereotyping and stigma directed towards all Deaf Americans by virtue of being classed as beggars and described with a rhetoric of dependence.
In response to increasing numbers of deaf peddlers who were actually deaf-mute imposters, the Deaf community made efforts to “ fight off the fake deaf men. ”15 Under the leadership of Olof Hanson, the National Association of the Deaf established the Imposter Bureau in 1911 to try to gain passage of legislation that would ban imposters, and by 1915—a time period that roughly coincides with the time frame of the last portion of the novel—many states had made progress in establishing formal bureaus to oversee each state’s efforts on anti-imposter work. On their agenda were anti-imposter and anti-vagrancy legislation, investigation of possible cases of imposterism, publicity, and information sharing. Some individuals and state bureaus worked directly with the police in their home cities to detect and expose deaf-mute imposters.16
In the manuscript, Mickey’s friend and travel companion, Bunny, also known as the “ Mighty Mite ” (and, as mentioned earlier, modeled after anti-imposter advocate J. Frederick Meagher), makes it his business to rout out deaf-mute imposters. Bunny regales Mickey with his many adventures traveling the nation and exposing deaf-mute peddlers and gangs of “ beggars and crooks. ” He says that “ these people were soliciting money for the purposes of attending a school for the deaf where they might learn a trade and become self-supporting, but really to be used for an easy existence! The crooks carried typed letters explaining how and when they had lost their hearing, and were now thrown helpless on the world. ” In keeping with Bunny’s perspective, in 1920, Imposter Bureau national president J. Frederick Meagher stated that the practice of imposterism brought “ the real deaf into disrepute by spreading the assumption we are all dependent on charity. ”17
As NAD President Jay Cooke Howard reported in 1913, “ The only way to enlist the people of the country is to explain to them, gently and pursuasively, [sic] what great big, full-fledged suckers they are when they hand out money to a person who pretends to be deaf. Convince them that they need have no fear of turning away a case of ‘ worthy charity ’ and drive it home to them that ‘ THE DEAF DO NOT BEG. ’ ”18 This national concern about the negative effects of such imposterism on the Deaf community—in the form of stereotyping and discriminatory practices—inspired Terry to include imposterism as a significant plot element in at least two creative works, one being this novel, and a second being a “ photoplay ” called “ The Deaf-Mute Imposter: His Exposure and Capture. ”19
The practice of peddling suggested to the public at large that schools for the deaf were failing at their mission. Within the community, Deaf peddlers and imposters were blamed for giving mainstream society the impression that first, “ manualism ” was a failure, and secondly, that deaf people were not employable.20 Deaf people felt compelled to defend their communities, education, and vocational training. Indeed, early in the novel, newly deafened Mickey anticipates critics of residential schools for the deaf when he enters the fictional Rosemont School for the Deaf and worries that children growing up there would become “ dependents. ” His worries are soon dispelled when he discovers that this school is like a small city, complete with a “ printing office, the bakery, the arts and crafts departments, the sewing room, and the art school. ” Here, he sees that deaf children are raised and well cared for, and he learns that deaf children are “ just as bright, just as mischievous, ” and with just as many “ embryo geniuses, ” little inventers and builders, writers, artists, and poets as their hearing peers. Schools for the deaf had always taught vocations and trades and by the twentieth century, they had increased the number of trades and the amount of time dedicated to the teaching of these trades.21 These residential schools prided themselves in providing their students with highly marketable skills that allowed them to be productive members of society.22
Vocational education was not practical in integrated public school settings at this time, and the Deaf community became concerned as they saw the rise in the popularity of oralism and the increasingly competitive climate of the workplace. Deaf people worried about losing employment opportunities by attending public schools with fewer opportunities for specialized training.23 By the early decades of the twentieth century, Deaf people saw their opportunities for employment decreasing, more pressure to acculturate to the mainstream through oralist methods of education, and few meaningful ways to participate in the political processes of each state and the nation.24
“ Without our schools in every state where most of the trades are taught, ” said Frances P. Gibson, grand secretary of the National Fraternal Society of the Deaf in 1915, “ we have no need of charity and do not ask it. But the work of the fake deaf-mute is making it very hard for the bona fide deaf to get work. ”25 As Bunny tells Mickey in the novel, after being turned down for jobs, “ ‘ Look at you and me, fair and square deaf men, begging for a chance to sweat for our daily bread, to earn an honest living, and being thus turned down ’— his face reddened as his anger grew—‘ then see varmints crawling around, hoodwinking all they approach and picking up dollars like stone . . . and spreading the damning impression that we deaf are outcasts and beggars! ’ ”
Employment was a central and pressing issue for the Deaf community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in order to maintain and preserve their community, their culture, and their natural language of signs, Deaf people felt they needed to show themselves to be perfectly capable and economically self-sufficient, well worth their education at the expense of the state.26
Labor, and specifically deaf laborers, is a recurring theme in the novel. Upon becoming deaf, young Mickey repeatedly asserts his able-bodiedness and independence; he tells his nurse that “ I can take care of myself, and I was taught many useful things to do. I can work. ” A fictional “ Factory Men’s Safety Act ” causes deaf men to lose their jobs in Mickey’s Harvest, even though, as Mickey’s college classmate notes, it’s “ all hysteria on the part of the bosses. We fellows don’t get injured any more than the hearing workmen—not so often—but we are fired and they are not. Ignorance and prejudice, as usual. ” Despite appearing to be physically “ normal, ” employers routinely rejected deaf applicants for jobs. In this process, deaf adults were grouped together with other people considered incapable of work or of contributing to society.27
In response to cultural pressures to conform to ideas of normalcy through behaving as much like hearing people as possible, many leaders in the white Deaf community at the turn of the century “ equated citizenship with normality and equality with full citizenship ”; as a result, advocates “ crafted a careful public image of a Deaf community that emphasized their fulfillment of societal ‘ norms’: white, middle class, educated, moral, hardworking, and highly patriotic citizens. ” Rejecting the “ stigma of difference ” and challenging the generally held perception of deafness as limiting, white Deaf community leaders presented themselves as capable, able-bodied Deaf citizens.28
They feared that efforts by fake (and actual) deaf beggars would contribute to the perpetuation of negative stereotypes related to deaf peoples ’ abilities, ideas that could lead to the continuation of such discriminatory practices as anti-deaf driver legislation. The Deaf community perceived these laws as “ unwarranted and unreasonable and altogether unjust discrimination against the right of the deaf to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. ”29 Additionally, at the time, deaf people could not easily obtain various kinds of insurance because they were considered a high-risk population. In response, the National Fraternal Society for the Deaf (NFSD) was established in 1901 to provide disability, sickness, and unemployment insurance,30 although only to white Deaf people.
It is important to note that when Deaf community leaders wrote about economic self-sufficiency and equality for deaf citizens, they almost always meant white deaf men. Some white deaf women, deaf African-Americans, and other deaf minorities were excluded through the sexist, segregationist, and racist policies and practices of the time. As such, the anti-peddling and the anti-imposter work of the day was overlaid with the class, race, and even gender ideologies of the time, and anti-peddling rhetoric revealed both ideals of citizenship and anxieties about deaf people’s place within a rapidly changing American society.31
By rejecting the idea of themselves as different, advocates and other members of the white Deaf community did not join with the many other minority groups also struggling against pressures to conform to hegemonic ideas of American citizenship. It is possible that, united by a common deaf experience, Deaf people may have had slightly different ideas about racial, ethnic, and religious differences among themselves as a group, but on the whole, the white Deaf community reflected ideologies similar to those of their hearing and regional counterparts.32 In a 1914 editorial responding to inquiries about employment opportunities for Deaf people in California, Terry wrote, “ Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, and other foreign labor has a firm hold, and the native white people cannot compete with them. ”33 In the novel, when Mickey describes Marion Carrel’s first entrance into the local deaf club, he reports that she sees a “ heterogeneous gathering of high and low… surrounded by a diversity of color quite unexpected and confusing. The rich and the poor, the good and the bad, were gathered there and freely mingling. ” However, this observation did not mean that the clubs were racially integrated; at this time, across the nation, Deaf clubs continued to be segregated largely along both ethnic and racial lines.34
“ Deaf Genes, ” Eugenics, and Physical Perfection
Mrs. Raleigh, the novel’s central villain, is a deaf-mute imposter who is revealed as such by the end of the story. However, by infiltrating different Deaf organizations and entering their leadership, she does not seem to foster much actual fake deaf peddling in the streets. Even though she runs a ring of peddlers, by virtue of her involvement with Deaf communities in the novel, her beggars are more likely “ bona fide ” deaf people, in the parlance of the era, and not deaf-mute imposters.
Instead of aligning neatly with the anti-vagrancy and investigative work of the NAD’s Imposter Bureau in the early twentieth century, the Beggar Queen/deaf-mute imposter plot in this novel instead coincides with a second, widespread, social concern—eugenics and the perceived role of consanguineous marriages in genetic causes of deafness. In his foreword, Terry notes that at the time of his final revision of the manuscript (1949), he had read a speech by a member of the English Parliament on the “ evils ” that result from artificial insemination; artificial insemination could, in turn, lead to consanguineous marriages with seriously affected offspring. “ Something in this way, ” he wrote, “ is brought out in my story. ” Indeed, the parents of one of the main deaf characters of the novel are revealed to have been closely related, and as such, this consanguineous alliance likely “afflicted” this character with deafness.
Eugenics, a movement arising from Social Darwinism, didn’t become a widespread ideology in the United States until the early years of the twentieth century. Eugenicists aimed to “ improve ” society by using scientific knowledge to encourage policies intended to remove genetic traits considered to be “ tainted, ” including hereditary deafness. They promoted the idea that people passed on genetic impairments to their children, but patterns of inheritance among deaf people were too complicated to be easily explained for the purposes of eugenic policies like prohibiting marriages between deaf people.35 The difficulty of distinguishing between hereditary and nonhereditary deafness meant that, for many scientists and policymakers, the arguments for forced sterilization were undermined.36
Mickey, in the course of his many adventures, meets and falls in love with a “ caged up ” young deaf woman named Marion Carrel, who has indeed been shut away for most of her young life. Mickey sees that her situation is similar to those of other deaf people who are “ unhappy victims of family pride, shut in and denied the right to enjoy life. ” When Mickey approaches Marion’s grandfather, he is sent away with the warning not to court Marion. Yet, Marion and Mickey arrange to have clandestine meetings, and Marion, who is just as mystified as Mickey as to the cause of her imprisonment, tells him, “ It’s the law—I don’t know why…I’m just like any other girl, hearing girl, I mean. ” It slowly dawns on Mickey that Mr. Carrel “ might be one of those people who are under the conviction that if deaf people marry the deaf, their children will be deaf, that one deaf person in the family was enough; he would end it at that. But how did it happen that this girl was born deaf? ” Marion tells Mickey that Mr. Carrel “ worships physical perfection ” and that his own father had been a “ eugenist. ” However, even while continuing to view deafness as a “ tragedy, ” Marion’s grandfather eventually comes around to see deaf people as very capable and able to do “ about everything that their hearing brothers are doing, ” including achievements in the arts, a point of pride for Mickey and his artist friends.
Able-bodiedness and achievement in the visual and written arts are held forth as arguments for intermarriage between deaf individuals, and this novel reflects some of the thinking at that time within the white Deaf community. In comments about marriage restrictions between deaf individuals, Alice Taylor Terry wrote that “ it is a most inhuman thing to think of—this idea of withholding marriage from physically and mentally fit individuals, ” but she also wrote, “ only to helpless dependents should marriage be withheld, such as the hopelessly diseased, the criminally bent—hereditarily so—the feebleminded and the insane. ”37†
“ Dogs of Toil ” and “ Unusual Sights ”: A Heritage of Deep Divisions
As the story of one white young man’s journey and struggles, Mickey’s Harvest: A Novel of a Deaf Boy’s Checkered Life presents a remarkable and troubling set of contradictions. The narrator is keenly aware of the social injustices and deep-seated discrimination perpetrated against him and other white Deaf young men and women. He also expresses a sharp awareness of socioeconomic differences and expresses these in terms of able-bodiedness; in one scene, he wanders along the San Francisco waterfront noting the contrasts between the “ feverish, moneyed, ” “ weak-limbed, ” and “ beribboned ” people in the cafes and the “ big, heavy-boned, steel-muscled, shirtless, tar-and-dirt-covered dogs of toil. ”
Mickey is keenly aware of the ways in which the hopes and dreams of his peers have been thwarted by a society that ill understands or employs deaf people. When he finds himself penniless, a friend tells him,
you are up against what every deaf fellow has to face about half the time—I mean those deaf who haven’t property or relatives to hold them upright and well shod…The fight is hard and bitter. The boys are discriminated against and their skill or their talent unrecognized. I’ve seen not a few of my friends take the pick or the hoe when they had the brains to do big things if given the chance. Those hated picks and hoes are the pokers that stir the embers of resentment and drive some to crime. The newspapers love to flaunt crime, and a crime perpetuated by a ‘ dummy ’ makes a choice headline.
Yet, this deep sense of empathy toward a particular downtrodden experience does not necessarily extend to oppressed groups. In an earlier scene, when Mickey first arrives in San Francisco, he remarks that deaf people find “ pleasurable sensations mostly through their eyes alone ” and that there are “ unusual sights ” in this cosmopolitan maritime city: “ Here were Japs, Anzacs, Kanaka men, Hindu men [and the list goes on]. ” There is no observation here that these diverse crowds might also contain penniless men toiling against the odds.
Mickey expresses the unreflective and pervasive ideologies of the era related to race and ethnicity. He describes a helpful and friendly Black porter on a train as a “ darkey ”; a hobo friend is jokingly labeled with a racial slur historically related to African Americans; a Chinese man working as a butler for the Carrel family is called a heathen and is heavily exoticized in his characterization; the traveling circus includes a “ cowboys and Indians ” act and women wearing veils and “ Turkish garb ”; and an Alhambra Valley, CA, man is described using an ethnic slur. Racist and ethnic stereotypes were also perpetuated in Deaf periodicals; for example, a 1913 article in The Silent Observer used the term “ darky ” and praised slave-era practices.38 Mickey also relates how other characters express the overt racism of the era; the last story that he is said to have heard before becoming deaf is a tale told by his sailor friend about a “ cannibal island ” inhabited by “ savages. ” Tellingly, the cargo of Mickey’s English father’s ship is filled with bounty—“ tobacco, sugar, spices, bananas, and Jamaican rum ”—from colonized lands.
Similarly, readers will see artifacts of oppressive attitudes related to gender, age, hearing status, English literacy, and ability. Mickey, a late-deafened young man, at times expresses stigmatizing attitudes toward his fellow deaf friends and classmates, particularly in relation to English literacy. Scholars in Deaf Studies have built upon the existing discussion of “ dysconscious racism ” and developed the useful idea of “ dysconscious audism. ”39 Readers of this novel are encouraged to read Mickey’s emerging identity as a signing Deaf person as reflective of the process other similarly late-deafened Americans may face as they work through the dissonance between dominant cultural values and norms related to hearing status and sign language and their own developing sense of self within the sociolinguistic and cultural community of Deaf people.
These artifacts of language suggest the prejudicial attitudes of early to mid-twentieth-century America, and readers are encouraged to take this opportunity to explore the ways in which language and characterization served the purposes of racist, sexist, ableist, audist, language privilege, and other oppressive ideologies of the time. To gain insight into the stigmatizing and oppressive forces at work in the world of this novel, Mickey’s Harvest should be read along with historical studies of early nineteenth-century America and the white Deaf community. Additionally, the body of scholarship surrounding the reprints of books like Mark Twains ’ Adventures of Huckleberry Finn provides multiple ways of reading racist language in older works.
“ A New Face on Matters ”: Acculturation of Both Narrator and Hearing Readers
Howard Terry was a late-deafened person in an era when postlingual deafness was much more common due to childhood diseases and accidents.40 He became deaf between the ages of eleven and twelve due to the onset of “ catarrhal deafness, ” an inflammation of the Eustachian tube and mucous membranes that was viewed as a common cause of deafness at that time.41 Writing initially from the perspective of a narrator who was not yet Deaf—in the sense of being a member of a sociolinguistic community—but no longer hearing may have given Terry more narrative and rhetorical strategies for presenting what would have been an unfamiliar subject for his hearing readers. Even though Mickey does not initially find much in common with his deaf peers, Terry makes clear in his foreword that his purpose is to describe and introduce his reader to “ the world of silent people. ”
At the beginning of the novel, Mickey is neither this nor that, mutable and in search of congeniality and like-minded peers and companions. The foreword to the novel, an excerpt from Mickey’s diary, perpetuates this latent perspective: “ I was like a bit of pollen, that, torn from the mother flower, floats about impotent, yet capable of bringing about a greater creation when it comes in contact with an affinity. ” This suggestion of a fruitful and bountiful connection would not have been lost on his readers; it is clear by the end that Mickey has found his place in the world with his wife, friends, and community in “ Deafdom. ”
The use of a late-deafened narrator also allowed Terry to use overt explanatory strategies in his elucidation of the Deaf experience; as an outsider, Mickey makes straightforward observations about what he sees. The white Deaf community—and its inhabitants and norms—are new for both Mickey and the presumed reader. He plays up the hearing perspective in order to show and portray the Deaf perspective to readers who presumably need some guidance into an unfamiliar subject. This, to some extent, may explain the residue of what can be described as dysconscious audism, or that “ form of audism that tacitly accepts dominant hearing norms and privileges. ”42 As Mickey says, “ I had mingled with hearing people long after I lost my hearing, so I retained their point of view well into my years of youth. ” Yet, as a result of his many experiences with different Deaf communities, Mickey feels very strongly attached to what he calls repeatedly throughout the novel “ my people, ” or “ my tribe. ”
In the novel, Mickey distinguishes between two eras in his life, the time before he became deaf, and then afterwards; he describes this as entering the “ silent world. ” Sound memories predominate in the scenes leading up to Mickey’s head injury and near-drowning. He is still hearing, however, and after being lost at sea for some time, he, like his creator, also develops “ catarrhal trouble. ” After being rescued from a lifeboat, Mickey is taken to a hospital in New York City, where “ the world began fading away from me, or that part of the world composed of sound. ” He quickly learns that perception is everything in this new world, and perceptions are stigmatized. Upon becoming deaf, he leaves the hospital and, in his unsteadiness, is mistaken for a drunk, with disastrous—if temporary—results. Thus his education begins.
Early in the novel, accommodations to Mickey’s newly acquired deafness are naturally folded within the narrative without much drama, and these practices and experiences are likely similar to those available to a boy of Mickey’s class and age at that time. For instance, a doctor writes his communication with Mickey on a pad of notepaper. Mickey guesses at much of what is happening around him in those early days of his deafness. Taken in by a kindly family in upstate New York, Mickey learns with his adoptive mother and sister how to “ talk on our fingers ” and lipreading. It is not clear where his adoptive family learned about deafness, sign language, and fingerspelling, but the lack of drama and angst surrounding their choice to use what would have been recognized as manual communication methods with Mickey is revealing.
After Mickey is bullied in the public school, his doctor recommends to his adoptive family that he be sent to a “ deaf and dumb asylum. ” This phrase “ struck [Mickey] as being very offensive ” in that such a reductive phrase would “ likely hurt children sent to such a place . . . brand[ed] with an unwholesome stigma. ” In keeping with attitudes of the Deaf community at that time, Mickey asks the doctor if it would be better to say “ deaf-mute ” instead.43 He also takes issue with the stigmatizing use of the word asylum in the name of the school for deaf children. The doctor reassures Mickey that at the school, deaf children are taught the same things that hearing children learn, but Mickey—like his creator, Howard Terry—vows that later, when he becomes a man he will “take up the cudgel and fight for the eradication of that unfair and damaging term, ‘ asylum.’”44
Mickey heads to the deaf school, and in a scene reminiscent of other Deaf writers ’ accounts of their arrival at deaf schools, he discovers he is not the only deaf person in the world. He quickly learns sign language, but not without first recognizing the “ strenuous ” nature of the language. Mickey’s acclimation to the school is not without difficulties, and these challenges echo those of other late-deafened students and new signers. As Mickey reports, “ again and again I would talk aloud as my inability to sign and spell rapidly would balk and irritate me. . . . My breaking forth into speech would exasperate the boys and offend the girls, who would call me an oralist. ” But after a year away from his hearing companions, he found that time had brought “ a new face on matters, had brought about a different viewpoint and a world of affairs quite different from those of hearing people. ” In this way, Terry slowly guides his hearing readers along a similar pathway.
Though not explicitly named as such, Gallaudet College makes an appearance in the novel. After graduating from a fictionalized New York state school for the deaf, Mickey heads to a college for deaf students in the nation’s capital, the “ city of [his] dreams. ” Once there, Mickey and a classmate promptly become targets for a prank. Pranks played on “ Ducks ” (lower classmen) are a common and recurring theme in that section of the narrative. But the college and the connections made there are key to Mickey’s growing sense of community.
At the college, he learns that he is “ neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, ” and that because “ school loyalty and rivalry is strong, [his] brief stay at an institution doesn’t quite place [him]. ” As a result, a classmate warns him, “ once you get out of [the college] and mix with the boys all over the land, you’ll be a lone bird. And if you ever amount to anything there won’t be any school to claim you and broadcast your name. And if you get into troubles with the boys here, if you make rivals . . . you’ll feel it later on, and you won’t have anyone to stand by you. ” He then tells Mickey why he should read a (fictional) community newspaper, The Deaf Man’s Times, because “ the deaf in every part of the country know what is doing among the deaf in other parts. ”
After two years in college, Mickey and his friend Dick make plans to say goodbye to the “ romance-haunted rooms, ” and the “ beautiful campus . . . the aging buildings that had been [their] home. ” They decide that the far West is their goal, but they will take their travel in stages—hitching a ride, walking, or staying and working for a time in cities to earn the money to continue their trip. In the “ larger towns and cities [they] would locate the deaf colony. ” Their reception is not always cordial because they find that articles in The Deaf Man’s Times have described them as a “ swellhead ” (Mickey) and a “ notorious borrower ” (Dick). Even so, they make their way across the country. Mickey’s continued immersion into different deaf schools and communities, organizations and clubs, and even the community newspaper, strengthen the idea of an “ extended family, ” an important experience for Deaf people as they faced intensified pressures to assimilate within the larger American society.45
Later in the novel, Dermit, the Deaf sculptor, tells Mickey that he is “ late in the ways of our kind. ” While Dermit is specifically referring to Mickey’s initiation to smoking cigars and his entrée into the life of “ men of Bohemia, ” it is clear that Mickey is indeed late to the ways of this sociolinguistic community. As a latecomer, Mickey occasionally breaks social rules for interacting with Deaf people. This stumbling over cultural norms establishes Mickey in a separate yet overlapping space. His concerns and experiences are very much the same as those of the two Deaf artists, but the outsider perspective allows Mickey the space in this narrative to elucidate both hearing and Deaf sides of an issue and to foreground the concerns of the Deaf community.
“ Bringing Out the Problems of the Deaf in Highly Dramatic Form ”: No Easy Resolution
Because Terry knew that his “ story of the world of the deaf ” would be seen as a special subject in mainstream publishing venues, he used a number of literary and rhetorical strategies to engage his anticipated reading audience. He intended to bring out “ the problems of . . . the deaf ” through the telling of a deaf man’s life story in “ interesting and highly dramatic form ” that at times echoed the shipwrecks and train wrecks of popular adventure stories of the day. The enclosure of the novel within a diary frame suggests a rhetorically constructed level of intimacy with the readers that demands that they come to understand and participate in a life and an experience that Terry clearly expected would be new to them.46
But even that frame and the familiar narrative trajectory toward marriage at the end resist easy narrative closure for the many different, ongoing, and unresolved social and economic conflicts related to white Deaf men’s lives at that time. The end of the novel presents what would seem to be a satisfactory close to Mickey’s journey from his early years as a deaf person to his young adulthood: his marriage, the discovery of his heroic endeavors, his repayment of a debt, and a reunification among friends. The storyline involving deaf genes, eugenic “ worship ” of physical perfection, and consanguineous marriages is neatly wrapped up, with the guilty parties expressing their complicity and grief. By the end of the novel, Mickey seems to have found a place where his late-deafened status and experiences can co-exist with his developing sense of identity as a Deaf person and his immersion in a subset of the Deaf community, the Deaf artists ’ community.
Even so, the idea that deafness could be and was seen at that time as a tragedy is not so easily dispensed with, despite the happy marriage between the deaf shut-in—now freed to socialize with her deaf, signing compatriots—and the late-deafened young man. Additionally, the socioeconomic concerns that all of the Deaf white men face in this novel are only partially addressed in the novel’s conclusion. The painter must still paint subjects he knows will sell because he has “ a family to feed and clothe, ” and Mickey wants to work in an industry—writing “ picture plays ” for the movies—that, he is warned, commonly does not credit writers. Mickey’s financial difficulties are only partially addressed, and because Marion’s fortunes take a great fall, the socioeconomic pressures and discrimination will continue in this fictional world—a mirror of the real one—even after the close of the novel.
Additionally, there is a telling shift in perspective and point of view that lends insight into how a Deaf writer, writing in the early-to-mid-twentieth century, attempted to address difficulties in publishing his work. Shortly before the end of the novel, Mickey’s diary abruptly ends with his disappearance, and a new narrator takes over. We know little about this new narrator except that initially he uses the first person, and says that “ Here ends Mickey’s Diary, save for a few pages covering his passage [to a different country]. I must now go on with my story. ” This new narrator then takes on the sweeping and important tones of a broadcaster, describing the onslaught of war. With the exception of the brief and abrupt shift to a different first-person point of view, this change in narration feels rather like an interruption in a black-and-white film, a shift outward to a panoramic view with a dramatic and sonorous narration of large-scale events.
Upon the conclusion of his panoramic summary of war, this new narrator once again abruptly shifts to an objective description of two of Mickey’s artist friends, unnamed and so made unfamiliar again in a way that feels like stage directions; they are “ an artist and a sculptor, deaf-mutes. ” This section is effectively unanchored to a specific and individual point of view, which raises questions about perspective and access. The new narrator quickly shifts back into a more familiar narrative voice, using the first names of the friends and conveying the signed dialogue in the same manner it had been given previously—in quotation marks, with few conversation tags. Even though access to a signed language and a particular community of friends is largely uninterrupted, the shift back outward serves as a reminder of a presumed hearing audience of readers.
The slipperiness of the outsider/insider vantage point allows the writer and narrator to inject information that addresses larger social and political goals related to representation and citizenship. In one telling early example, Mickey writes about a “ convention of my people ” in a city where the local newspaper describes the event as being led by the “ dead ” [underlining in original], a common typographical error for deaf that persists even today. Mickey clearly saw this error as being either a joke played upon the deaf conference attendees at their expense or incompetence in typesetting. Despite the presence of stigmatizing attitudes regarding English literacy and speech ability, Terry’s advocacy on behalf of the Deaf community and his efforts to make the heretofore invisible visible for his readers continue and intensify through the novel. However, the disjunction between what Terry cherished and knew well, the subject of his novel, and his disappointing experience with publishers who perceived his novel as having a limited audience appears dramatically on a structural and rhetorical level in the second half of the story.
Near the end of the novel, two different manuscripts emerge, merge, and disappear. One is the diary that opens up the novel, and the second is a novel manuscript that Mickey—as recounted in the diary—has spent months on, a novel fleshed out from a skeletonized story told to him by Marion Carrel’s grandfather, Amos Carrel. Somehow, the diary ends up in the hands of Mrs. Raleigh, who reveals the story behind the cause of Marion’s deafness to the artists Dermit and Edsum. This section shifts outward again to a larger frame and ends with the “ artist and the sculptor staring at each other in mute wonder. ”
At this point, the “ I ” who intervened so abruptly after Mickey’s departure and the end of his diary emerges again. Readers learn that he is a journalist who has “ heard ” of the two deaf artists and that he does not know sign language. The journalist and the two Deaf artists exchange written notes, in which the journalist calls himself a “ hearing man. ” This is a remarkably self-aware and observant way for a journalist of that era to describe himself in relation to his two Deaf conversation partners. In this meeting, the two artists describe Mickey’s manuscript as “ an amazing story, but in the rough. ” They say that it “ will need the skill of a trained writer to prepare it for publication. ” The journalist quickly reads the manuscript and recognizes what they mean, but he still sees “ something good in the manuscript. ”
The journalist and the two artists then are precipitously interrupted, and the novel comes to a quick end, with all the main plotlines wrapped up neatly, except for the issue of the two manuscripts. Readers never learn what happens to either the diary or the completed manuscript about a “ she-mute. ” The journalist relates the final moment with an empathetic and joyous description of the reunification of friends of Deafdom, but it raises questions about who is narrating, revising, and possibly editing this entire manuscript, including the diary, and for whom.
As readers, we are left to reflect on the circular nature of the narration. Have we been reading Mickey’s completed novel all along, with the diary format framing all except the very last portion of the novel where the point of view shifts to the journalist? If so, then what is the hearing journalist’s function? And, if Mickey’s friends are wary and savvy commercial artists, why do they trust the journalist so quickly and give him the manuscript? In the world of this novel, has the journalist revised Mickey’s manuscript and is that what we are now reading? If so, why would the artists give Mickey’s manuscript to a hearing man to revise when Mickey has taken such pains to explain and to demonstrate his own masterly skills in written English? Was this a move on Terry’s part to make the story more palatable to presumed hearing readers who might hold onto preconceived ideas about deafness and Deaf writing? Terry himself said that this was the final version, but handwritten edits on the original typed manuscript, including the insertion of multiple ellipses near the end of the novel, suggests that he may have wanted to continue editing but felt that this “ last revised version ” was ready to be donated.47
“ The Very Thing that Makes Our Lives Worth Living . . . This Sign Language ”
Using Mickey, a formerly hearing person, as the narrator for a novel that is so intrinsically about the white Deaf community of the era and the tensions of the time allowed Terry to elucidate political concerns important to the Deaf community for a larger and unaware audience. These concerns included participation in national and local communities of Deaf people, the teaching of a trade, equitable hiring practices in labor, resistance to stereotyped attitudes towards deafness, and the use of sign language in education and life. Terry also gives his character Bunny the opportunity to expound on signing Deaf people’s view of oralism. In one remarkable conversation, Bunny says that the oralists
would destroy the very thing that makes our lives worth the living. They hate this sign language and believe that every deaf person can and should read the lips, an idea spread by propagandists, and if we can’t, we are not to be reckoned with. Some people think they can sing, or paint, or write. Of these a few succeed, while most fail. Same way with this lipreading art, some will learn it while others fail, and then there is nothing left for them but our signs and the alphabet, which would be denied them; then follows the moron, the deaf man or woman with the wrecked brain.
This pronouncement is made all the more poignant given the next part of the story: Bunny admits that he tried lipreading because his mother made him, but his teacher sent him home saying that he was a “ weak-minded, hopeless creature. ” Mickey then says that even for him, as a former hearing person, “ lipreading is too difficult to learn ever to such a success as its supporters claim it will be. ”
Clearly, Terry also knew what it meant to be a late-deafened person and a late signer, but his choice of narrator allowed him space to explore some of the tangential lives in the white Deaf community (for example, Deaf circus performers, itinerants, and isolated deaf oral lives). “ Out here, ” Terry wrote Dr. Elstad, “ a number of orally taught deaf have been suicides. One of these was a very beautiful girl here in Hollywood. . . . Her parents would not let her mix with the deaf, nor learn signs. . . . I drew my character of Marion Carrel from this unfortunate girl. ”48 Mickey’s acculturation and immersion into the white Deaf community take time, but along the way, he advocates social and political causes he sees as important to the betterment of all deaf people—highlighting the negative impact of imposterism, critiquing the result of stigma and audist attitudes on hiring deaf men for work, advocating access to sign language and to the signing community, and increasing opportunities for Deaf men in the arts, including writing.
Presaging the concept of “ deaf gain ” by about one hundred years, Mickey even describes several advantages unique to Deaf people. In one notable conversation Mickey and Bunny hold forth on the emergence of policies prohibiting deaf people from driving. Bunny asks, “ Are the papers full of accidents caused by deaf drivers? We deaf are always looking, watching, while the hearing people are always talking, talking, and getting into trouble—because they don’t use their eyes. ” In a dramatic incident shortly after that speech, Mickey and his friend demonstrate the very real advantages of being attentive to the environment. This notion of visuality as an advantage unique to sighted Deaf people also appears later at a key moment in the developing romance between Mickey and Marion.
One compelling feature of Terry’s writing in this novel is the way he presents signed language on the page. The conversation tags do not involve spoken language unless Mickey is using his voice. When signed, the dialogue is attributed through non-spoken terms: a character “ surmises ” or is “ told ” information; another character “ spells wearily ”; others “ pause ” and “ resume ” in their signed dialogue; still others “ turn ” to each other. After one long conversation between Edsum and Mickey about the difficulties Deaf artists have in selling their work in the hearing marketplace, Mickey describes the conversation as a “ long word picture. ” This manuscript is remarkable—and consistent—in its efforts to find spaces on the printed page for signed dialogue. Terry, as a writer, clearly cherished “ our deaf world, ” as Mickey says, and intended for his hearing and nonsigning readers to leave with the same understanding that Amos Carrel has by the end of the novel: Mickey tells him “ about my friends back East following their trades and marrying and raising children; in fact, doing about everything their hearing brothers were doing. ”
Terry began this manuscript nearly one hundred years ago, in 1917. Initially titled Adventures in Silence, it is both flawed and compelling, troubling and inspiring. In 1951, thirty-four years after its inception, Terry donated the manuscript to Gallaudet College. He wrote that “ so very much of [Mickey’s Harvest] has background in fact, out of my own life and the lives of other deaf. ”49 It is in this light that Mickey’s Harvest is best read, as a reflection of a particular experience, time, and place. It is an insider’s view of the development of what we know to be some of the many historically important community networks of Deaf people in early to mid-twentieth-century America: the national network of well-educated and politically active white Deaf people and the Deaf artists ’ community in California.
At the end of the novel, Mickey’s friends and his wife toast him as the “ bravest boy in Deafdom! ” He corrects them and says, “ No; just the happiest! ” The uprooted and orphaned Mickey, after his long travels from sound to “ silence, ” from country to country, from town to city, has finally found his home, his family, and his community. This is one of the most resonant moments of the novel, a moment in which like meets like and recognizes the other for who they are—an extended family in a profoundly unsettling time in both fiction and life. As Mickey notes in the foreword to the novel, he, like many other Deaf people, are “ capable of bringing about a greater creation when it comes in contact with an affinity. ” In this vein, Howard Leslie Terry has written a novel that provides, in narrative form, a politically oriented reflection on varied Deaf lives, art, labor, and language in the early twentieth century.
Notes
1.Howard Terry to Leonard M. Elstad, 25 May 1951, Gallaudet University Library Deaf Collections and Archives, Washington, DC.
2.Howard Terry to Leonard M. Elstad, 14 August 1951, Gallaudet University Library Deaf Collections and Archives, Washington, DC.
3.Lang and Meath-Lang, Deaf Persons in the Arts and Sciences, 339; Clark, Deaf American Poetry, 90–96; Meagher, “ A Deaf Writer’s Success, ” 68.
4.Terry, “ A Sophomore’s Revenge, ” 43–44; Burch, “ Terry, Alice Taylor, ” 897–98; Robinson, “ The Extended Family, ” 45; Lang and Meath-Lang, Deaf Persons in the Arts and Sciences, 340.
5.Terry, “ Report of Literary Bureau, ” 54.
6.Ibid.
7.Terry to Elstad, 25 May 1951.
8.Terry, “ Report of Literary Bureau, ” 54.
9.Terry to Elstad, 14 August 1951.
10.Clark, Deaf American Poetry, 91.
11.Terry to Elstad, 25 May 1951.
12.“ Another Fraud on the Public, ” 4; “ An Effective Way With Tramps, ” 105.
13.Robinson, “ The Deaf Do Not Beg, ” 1; Burch, Signs of Resistance, 149.
14.“ Not Deaf, ” 66; “ Newark Notes, ” 135.
15.“ The Deaf Do Not Beg, ” 152.
16.Burch, Signs of Resistance, 150; Robinson, “ The Deaf Do Not Beg, ” 71.
17.Meagher, “ Report of the Imposter Bureau, ” 45.
18.Howard, “ Mr. Howard’s Report on Impostors, ” 105.
19.Robinson, “ The Deaf Do Not Beg, ” 54.
20.Ibid., 25–26.
21.Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 97.
22.Van Cleve, “ The Academic Integration of Deaf Children, ” 125.
23.Ibid.
24.Robinson, “ The Deaf Do Not Beg, ” 14.
25.“ Faker Is Target of the Deaf, ” 191.
26.Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 123; Robinson, “ The Deaf Do Not Beg, ” 15.
27.Burch, Signs of Resistance, 103.
28.Ibid., 3, 4, 5.
29.Meagher, “ The NAD Fratities, ” 49.
30.Robinson, “ The Deaf Do Not Beg, ” 9.
31.Ibid., 3, 43.
32.Burch, Signs of Resistance, 5, 39; Robinson, “ The Deaf Do Not Beg, ” 9.
33.Terry, “ To Those Who Would Come, ” 138.
34.Padden and Humphries, Inside Deaf Culture, 80.
35.Robinson, “ The Deaf Do Not Beg, ” 21; Van Cleve and Crouch, A Place of Their Own, 148–50.
36.Burch, Signs of Resistance, 134.
37.Ibid., 143, 165.
38.Ibid., 93.
39.Gertz, “ Dysconscious Audism, ” 219–34.
40.Brian Greenwald, email to author, 7 October 2014.
41.Meagher, “ A Deaf Writer’s Success, ” 68; Goldsmith, “ The Pathology and Treatment of Chronic Catarrhal Deafness, ” 293–99.
42.Gertz, “ Dysconscious Audism, ” 219.
43.Burch, Signs of Resistance, 34.
44.Terry, “ Report of Literary Bureau, ” 54.
45.Burch, Signs of Resistance, 72.
46.Terry to Elstad, 14 August 1951.
47.Ibid.
48.Terry to Elstad, 25 May 1951.
49.Terry to Elstad, 14 August 1951.
Bibliography
“ An Effective Way With Tramps. ” Silent Worker 21, no. 6 (March 1909): 105.
“ Another Fraud on the Public. ” Silent Worker 4, no. 34 (September 1891): 4.
Baynton, Douglas. Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Bell, Alexander Graham. Memoir Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1884.
Buchanan, Robert. Illusions of Equality: Deaf Americans in School and Factory, 1850–1950. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1999.
Burch, Susan. Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900–1942. New York: New York University Press, 2002.
———. “ Terry, Alice Taylor. ” In Encyclopedia of American Disability History, edited by Susan Burch, 897–98. New York: Facts on File, 2009.
Clark, John Lee, ed. Deaf American Poetry: An Anthology. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2009.
Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995.
“ The Deaf Do Not Beg. ” Silent Worker 27, no. 8 (May 1915): 152.
“ Faker Is Target of the Deaf. ” Silent Worker 27, no. 10 (July 1915): 191.
Gertz, Genie. “ Dysconscious Audism: A Theoretical Proposition. ” In Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking, edited by H-Dirksen L. Bauman, 219–34. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Greenwald, Brian. “ The Real ‘ Toll ’ of A. G. Bell: Lessons about Eugenics. ” In Genetics, Disability, and Deafness, edited by John Vickrey Van Cleve, 35–41. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2004.
———. “ Taking Stock: Alexander Graham Bell and Eugenics, 1883–1922. ” In The Deaf History Reader, edited by John Vickrey Van Cleve, 136–52. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2007.
Goldsmith, Perry G. “ The Pathology and Treatment of Chronic Catarrhal Deafness. ” The Canadian Medical Association Journal 12, no. 5 (May 1922): 293–99.
Howard, Jay Cooke. “ Mr. Howard’s Report on Impostors. ” In Proceedings of the Tenth Convention of the National Association of the Deaf, 104–6. Olathe, KS: The Independent Printing Co., 1913.
Lang, Harry G., and Bonnie Meath Lang. Deaf Persons in the Arts and Sciences: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.
Meagher, Frederick J. “ A Deaf Writer’s Success. ” Silent Worker 25, no. 4 (January 1913): 68–69.
———. “ The NAD Fratities. ” Silent Worker 32, no. 2 (November 1919): 49.
———. “ Report of the Imposter Bureau. ” In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Convention of the National Association of the Deaf, 45–47. Washington, DC: The National Association of the Deaf, 1920.
“ Newark Notes. ” Silent Worker, 27, no. 7 (April 1915): 135.
“ Not Deaf. ” Silent Worker 21, no. 4 (January 1909): 66.
Padden, Carol, and Tom Humphries. Inside Deaf Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Pettie, Cynthia. “ Terry, Howard. ” In Encyclopedia of American Disability History, edited by Susan Burch, 898–99. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2009.
Proceedings of the Ninth Convention of the National Association and the Third World’s Congress of the Deaf, 91. Los Angeles, CA: Philocophus Press, 1910.
Robinson, Octavian. “ The Deaf Do Not Beg: Making the Case for Citizenship, 1880–1956. ” PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2012.
Robinson, Sara. “ The Extended Family: Deaf Women in Organizations. ” In Women and Deafness: Double Visions, edited by Brenda Jo Brueggemann and Susan Burch, 40–56. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2006.
Terry, Howard Leslie. “ Report of Literary Bureau, ” in Proceedings of the Eleventh (Special) Convention of the National Association of the Deaf, 53–55. Kansas City, MO: Walkenhorst Printing Co., 1916.
———. “ A Sophomore’s Revenge. ” Silent Worker 23, no. 3 (December 1910): 43–44.
———. “ To Those Who Would Come. ” Silent Worker 26, no. 7 (April 1914): 138.
Van Cleve, John Vickrey. “ The Academic Integration of Deaf Children: A Historical Perspective. ” In The Deaf History Reader, edited by John Vickrey Van Cleve, 116–35. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2007.
Van Cleve, John Vickrey, and Barry A. Crouch. A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1989.