Tried to end deafness but refused to listen
I used to view Alexander Graham Bell primarily as the father of the telephone rather than as a fully fleshed-out human being. My image of him — until now — is that of an avuncular, benevolent figure who effectively blew, and then expanded, the hive mind by enabling electronic, distanced conversation.
In “The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness,” Katie Booth doesn’t dispute that assessment, amplifying it with details about how competitive the telephone field was, especially in its infancy. This granularity situates Bell among other inventors, experimenters and visionaries struggling to incorporate the latest technology into their talking machines.
Bell’s telephone travails are only part of the complex picture Ms. Booth paints in her ambitious, revisionist book. A faculty tutor at the University of Pittsburgh Writing Center who specializes in English as a second language, she was raised in a mixed hearing/deaf family. She wrote this to set the record straight and to avenge her grandmother, who died without access to an American Sign Language interpreter to express her medical and spiritual needs.
Because Ms. Booth’s grandmother couldn’t communicate through spoken language, she became a captive who couldn’t be helped and fell through the cracks of the hospital system, Ms. Booth suggests. In a sense, the author blames Bell, who was the son of a deaf woman and married a deaf woman. Despite the challenging and rewarding bonds Bell forged in his personal life, he also did his best to further oralism and banish ASL. Deepening that division didn’t help anybody.
“Toward the end of his life, Bell had said that the signing Deaf ‘represent our failures. Let us have as few of them as we possibly can.’ These people were my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my greataunts and -uncles,” Ms. Booth writes in her prologue.“Because of Bell’s influence, they learned to be ashamed
“THE INVENTION OF MIRACLES: LANGUAGE, POWER, AND ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL’S QUEST TO END DEAFNESS”
because they used sign language. For their whole lives, their joy in free communication, so easily granted to hearing people, was tainted by this shame.”
Alexander Graham Bell is a complex figure, according to Ms. Booth’s account, so scrupulously researched you feel like you’re walking alongside the inventor as he strides the Scottish moors or looking over his shoulder as he researches the qualities
of different kinds of current in his Boston home. Bell was a fundamentally good, if distant, father, and a man consumed by his own curiosity, driven to prodigious, deeply wrongheaded educational programs. In his later years, he became a promoter of eugenics who believed that that pseudoscience justified profoundly racist views of genetics.
At times, Ms. Booth’s style is highly poetic, even moving. At others, it’s polemic and appropriately infuriating. Her history aims to illuminate a man— and an era — in which industry began to give way to technology, notions of race
started to expand, and the profile of a singular community —the deaf — began to rise.
Deafness confounded and angered Bell, driving him to denigrate the condition as he forced the deaf students he purported to help to learn English and attempt to speak. The goal was not empowerment but conformity. The drive led to major rifts in the deaf community, not to mention resentment at Bell’s heavy-handedness.
In the late 1870s, Bell became involved in an oralist school in Scotland designed for families who otherwise had to send their deaf children abroad for schooling.
Bellwas concerned that these students wouldn’t reintegrate with their families upon return. “He saw deafness as a ‘defect,’ and suggested the world would be better off without it,” Ms. Booth writes. “This school, like all oralist schools, would be built off this assumption.”
Her brave book is the story of a contradictory genius whose inventiveness outstripped his compassion.
By Katie Booth Simon & Schuster ($30)