Remembering Rose Ellen Part 4: The Indiana State Archives:

Rose Ellen was admitted to The Indiana State School for Feeble-Minded Children in Fort Wayne, IN, in January 1933 at 19 years of age. She spent 38 years there.

To receive the documents from the Indiana State Archives required a simple form.  I filled out the information I knew about Rose Ellen: her name, birth date, parent’s names, and my relation to her and included a copy of my birth certificate and driver’s license as proof that I was a living relative. On the line asking why I wanted the records; I checked the box for “family history.” I dropped the request in the mail and in less than a week, I received a confirmation that my request was received.

Ms. Bullard,                                                                               Thursday Sep 7 8:49AM

Your request has been received by the Indiana State Archives. I have located records for Rose Skeen at the Fort Wayne Developmental Center. The file is quite extensive given her long residence, and a full scan would be over two hundred pages and a fee of about $150. If you prefer, I can prepare a summary file at whatever price point you are comfortable with that includes the most important information and omits items such as clinical tests and physician and nurse’s reports. Typically, most of the relevant information can be captured in under 50 pages, for a roughly $30 fee. We don’t have nursing home records here, just those from State facilities.

Let me know how you would like to proceed

Best,

Keenan Salla, archiviist

I quickly responded to Keenan, that I wanted the whole file, every page. I made an online payment for $196.16 at 9:47am then sat down to work. At 10:47 the file was in my inbox, all 256 pages.

The archives contained so much information it was mind-boggling. What I was the most unprepared for was the sight of handwritten letters, written in beautiful cursive from my Grandmama to the school and to Rose Ellen. There were three of the weekly letters that Rose Ellen wrote to her parents. There were letters written by my Papa Don to the institution, visitor logs, and so much more. Every page led to a new discovery.  I have since read each page many times. I tried to sort the pages by the categories listed below. Within most categories there are handwritten letters, lists, logs, evaluations, medical records, and a lot of correspondence between Grandmama and Papa Don and the institution. The existence of these records astounds me. Nearly each page contains some piece of the puzzle of Rose Ellen’s life as well as my Papa Don’s and Grandmama’s. The long-kept silence had been broken. Here was some definitive information about my aunt.

State Archives Document Categories:

●  Record Of Inquest 1933

●  Testing, Evaluations and Behavior logs, Caretaker Notes

●  Visitor Logs: 1933-1966 (few missing years) & Requests to Visit Rose Ellen

●  Rose Ellen’s Belongings: special notes on the radio & batteries, thermos, and pillowcase

●  Rose Ellen’s Birthday party and the Adopt-a-Patient program

●  Sad episode for Rose Ellen: move from Dunham Hall to Harper Lodge, 1969

●  Letters: 1960s-1971

●  Consent for surgery, Burial instructions and Eye Exam

●  Notifications: illness, social security, Guardianship

●  Discharge from Fort Wayne to Carlye Nursing home in South Bend.

My attempt to “organize” the documents was rough. The pages crossed categories and one letter was a response to another, and so the pages moved from pile to pile. Each time I moved one page from pile B to pile F, another link was found. Nearly each page held some clue, some piece of information to enlighten me on Rose Ellen’s life. I am amazed that these records exist at all and take each added piece of information as a treasure. Through these records, we know something of her personality and we learn of the great devotion my grandparents had to their daughter. I learned she had a favorite stuffed animal, or “lovey” as they are known at my house, a Judy Monkey doll, that was lost for a while and then found! I learned she had a best friend that she pined for when they were separated. I learned my grandparents wrote to her, sent her packages, visited her often and took her to their home for 2 weeks in the summer. But I also learned of the difficulties she and my grandparents faced.

To understand Rose Ellen’s life, I needed to understand the prevailing attitudes and beliefs people had about disability and how the institutions being created were built to serve their purpose. Societal attitudes form public policy, which then shapes programs and services. Therefore, what society felt or believed at any given time dictated what types of services people with disabilities received. Rose Ellen was born in a time period when it was believed that people with feeblemindedness were prolific, that feeblemindedness was highly hereditary, and that people labeled as feebleminded were considered a menace and a danger to the community and were responsible for most societal problems.

“When the form had been completed,

an official of the institution glanced at Mayo

and decided into what category the boy should be placed.

The official had no training for that and had not bothered to give Mayo any test.

He graded human beings by eye, as a farmer grades potatoes.

He decided “medium-grade imbecile” was about right for Mayo.

 He then filled out an admitting card,

assigning Mayo a number, 822.”

Mayo Buckner Story: 1898, 8 years old,

Iowa Home for Feeble-Minded Children, Diagnosing Mayo

In the article “An Historical Perspective on the Lives of People Labeled with Cognitive Impairments in Western Massachusetts” by Donald LaBrecque you hear more about social policies of the times.

 “The social policies at that time were to identify those with feeblemindedness and to improve society by the use of eugenics. The development of intelligence testing came at this time and helped to fulfill the need to identify any child who was deemed feebleminded.  Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, developed a screening scale that, by performance, could identify degrees of retardation, measured against a norm. Binet fought against the use of the scale to limit or over-diagnose children. His scale was designed to “help and improve, not label and limit.” He believed that intelligence could be increased by good education and that education should adapt to the child’s character and aptitudes and on the necessity for adapting ourselves to their needs and their capabilities (Binet 1909, p.15)

However, the use of Intelligence testing in the United States was popularized by Dr. Henry H. Goddard, the director of research at the Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in Vineland New Jersey and others, who perfected and applied this new and powerful instrument (President’s Committee on Mental Retardation, 1977, p.10). Godard administered the test on children; both those labeled “mentally deficient” and those of ordinary intelligence. In 1913, he shocked the world with his findings that beyond the well-known cases of “idiots” and “imbeciles” was a much larger class of “feebleminded, heretofore, unknown, of mild degree but of definite incapacity. He coined the term “moron” to describe this larger class of people. “

Binet  worried about his scale being used to indelibly label people and negatively set expectations “They seem to reason in the following way: “Here is an excellent opportunity for getting rid of all the children who trouble us and without critical spirit, they designate all who are unruly, or disinterested in the school” (Binet, 1090 p.169) (LaBrecque, 2002)

The Indiana Plan

Rose Ellen was institutionalized in the state that was the birth of eugenics. The Indiana History Disability Project tells the dark story of the nation’s first mandate to legalize sterilization.

An Excerpt from the Indiana Disability History Project: Eugenics Exhibit:

​​“As the 19th century came to a close, attitudes began to change. People labeled “feeble-minded” were increasingly seen as a burden, even a threat, to society. Many politicians, educators, and other Hoosier reformers were adopting the notion of eugenics, a theory of better breeding and human improvement thought to be based on science. In 1907, Indiana became the first state in the U.S. to legislate mandatory sterilization. Although the targets of this and later versions of the legislation also included criminals, the “insane,” and people with epilepsy, its victims over the following six decades were largely institutionalized people with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities. The “Indiana Plan,” as it came to be known, anticipated similar measures in other states long before the eugenic policies of Nazi Germany (Indiana Disability History Project, 2022).

“The public’s appetite for social obligations were being influenced by many factors, but one ideological belief soon rose above the others. In 1907, the General Assembly of Indiana passed, among other things, a bill to make Lincoln’s birthday a legal holiday and a bill providing for involuntary sterilization of habitual criminals and idiots in state institutions in order to stop the propagation of their kind.

It was the world’s first eugenic sterilization law. In 1909, a new governor, Thomas Marshall, soon put a stop to the process by threatening the funding of institutions that use the law. The law was eventually struck down in 1921 by the Indiana Supreme Court, but shortly thereafter, the legislature succeeded in passing a second law in 1927, removing serious criminals and confining it to just the insane, feebleminded or epileptic as before it applied only to those housed within state institutions. (Indiana Disability History Project, 2022)

A letter to the editor of the News Sentinel on February 13, 1931, put it quite bluntly,

“The feebleminded, as a rule, come from the homes of the poor, and yet they present one of the serious problems of the state. When at large, they reproduce and multiply more rapidly than normal individuals. They are found in our children’s homes, our county infirmaries in our jails and in our prisons. And unless the public is aroused and some session of the General Assembly has the courage to meet the problem in a scientific and understanding manner. These types of individuals will present an ever-increasing burden on society

While there are a considerable number who will argue that sterilization is the wrong step, there are none who will deny that segregation of the feeble-minded in institutions makes impossible their marriage and reproduction of their own kind. What is the bearing of the laws of heredity upon human affairs? Eugenics provides the answer so far as this is known.

Eugenics seeks to apply the known laws of heredity so as to prevent the degeneration of the race and improve its inborn qualities. In institutions such as this all over the country, mental defectives are cared for. These are children who are helpless in every way and need constant attention. Once they have been born, defectives are happier and more useful in these institutions than when at large. But it would have been better by far for them and for the rest of the community if they had never been born.”

That letter was written by Charles McGonagale, superintendent of the Fort Wayne State School (PBS, 2022).

Sterilization at Fort Wayne:

The overcrowding at state institutions led to a push to rapidly parole older patients to make room for younger ones. The Fort Wayne State School made sterilization a prerequisite for release, a policy that began in 1932. For the next 25 years, an average of 57 patients were sterilized each year at the Fort Wayne State School. It was almost a 50/50 split of men and women. The average age was 24, although the largest single age group was 16-year-olds. (PBS, 2022)

Indiana’s 1927 sterilization law, which was amended several times over the years but remained the principal legal foundation for forced sterilization in state institutions, was not repealed until 1974. Over that 47-year time span, over 2,000 sterilizations were performed in Indiana. (Indiana Historical Bureau, 2024)

I don’t know if Rose Ellen was sterilized, but it is not unlikely. There is one cryptic note in the archival documents stating that “Rose Ellen continues to complain about her surgery site, even though the surgery was performed years ago.”

In the 1930s, the situation for people with disabilities began to show some marginal positive change. It became understood that people with disabilities were, in fact, people, and should be afforded the rights and privileges enjoyed by all citizens.  It became understood that there were many other factors that cause mental retardation other than heredity and that intelligence testing alone is not sufficient to diagnose a child with mental retardation. This gradual change in societal attitudes, however, did not necessarily lead to better treatment of people with disabilities, for several decades.

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Up Next: Remembering Rose Ellen: Part 5: Evaluating Rose Ellen