Disability Democracy: The Origins of Blind-Led Organizing in the United States, 1829-1935

This dissertation considers the emergence, activities, and legacies of blind-led organizing in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century United States as a vehicle for deepening understanding of the long history of political and social movement building around disability. Rooted in analysis of archival, digital, legal, material-object, and published sources, it considers how blind-led organizing—some of the first political work around disability led by disabled people themselves—and its fruits were shaped at every stage by the historical contexts in which organizers operated. The dissertation draws on the frameworks and methodological resources of U.S. history and intersectional disability studies. In the 1830s, residential blind schools formed as a strand of U.S.-American nationalism and Christian reform during key years in the United States’ ascent as a major expansionist settler-empire on the North American continent. Though this was not the intent of the sighted founders of the schools, who feared that bonds formed between blind people might encourage their isolation, the schools became incubators of blind sociality, and, by extension, blind politics. A small blind elite emerged from the schools as the first generations of pupils graduated from them. Most members of the blind elite were white men, the cohort most served by the schools in this period. The blind elite fostered the development and innovation of technologies tailored to blind people’s access needs—especially tools for blind writing like point types (including braille) and typewriters—in a world designed and run by nonblind people. They engaged collective self-help and middle-class-cultivation strategies, which they disseminated through alumni groups, social clubs, and benevolent societies. Generally pervasive economic inequality, structural barriers to blind workers’ employment, and anti-blind prejudice collided to deepen the likelihood of blind people’s poverty—and thus the likelihood of discursive connections between blindness and poverty. Alongside sighted people, middle-class blind organizers created and maintained workshops which employed blind people who might have otherwise been excluded from participation in the labor market and paid them extremely low wages to conduct repetitive and monotonous work. This and other assistance to blind people poorer than themselves functioned as a strategy to decouple cultural associations between blindness and poverty during a period in which