^B00:00:12 >> John Haskell: Hello, I'm John Haskell, Director of the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. Welcome to Kluge Book Conversations, and thank you for joining us. We're here today with Katie Booth to discuss her recent book, The Invention of Miracles. Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness. Let me to you little bit about Katie. She teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh, and her work has appeared in many periodicals, including Harper's Magazine and McSweeney's Quarterly. The sign for this was a notable essay in the 2016 edition of Best American Essays. Among other awards, Katie received a Kluge Fellowship with us at the Library of Congress in 2017, and we're very proud welcome her back for this book conversation. Katie, thanks for joining us. >> Katie Booth: Thank you, John. >> John Haskell: So, I'm going to start with some broader questions, Katie, to sort of get us into your thinking, as you wrote the book. For example, why was Bell of interest to you, and what motivated you through what was about a decade of research and writing? >> Katie Booth: Yeah, well, I grew up in a family of inter-generational deafness. My parents were hearing, but my grandparents, my great-grandparents, my great aunts and uncles were all deaf. And so, it wasn't so much that like one day I discovered Bell's story as that I had grown up with, Bell's story. I knew the impact of Bell from a very young age. It was part of sort of a cultural story that was passed down to me. But it wasn't until I was about 18 and my grandmother had a heart attack, my deaf grandmother, and she was hospitalized, and I witnessed, really up close, the prejudice against sign language and the high, high stakes of that prejudice. She was denied an interpreter. Nobody contacted our family. My grandmother just was waiting in that hospital in the aftermath of a severe heart attack, with no idea what was happening, and I was just so hit by that experience, and I kind of got stuck in it. I just -- I felt like I needed to understand what had happened that brought us to this place where this sort of event was normal in the deaf world. And so, that's where I started to look into the history of sign language, and specifically, Alexander Graham Bell's impact. >> John Haskell: That's very powerful. Tell us a little bit about the research process. What collections, for example, did you look at at the Library of Congress? >> Katie Booth: Well, primarily, I looked at the Alexander Graham Bell family papers, which is a huge collection, and it's just full of amazing material. You know, countless, countless letters, journals, notebooks, lab notebooks, presentations, lectures, all sorts of stuff. But the stuff that I like loved that I think actually really helped me make this not just a nonfiction book, but a story that had sort of some of life to it were these tiny scraps of paper, things like grocery lists or little doodles, things like that, really brought people to life. But then, there are other moments where even the bigger events like Alexander Graham Bell's death, his wife had just written -- had made a record of that. You know, other people who were present also made a record. But Mabel wrote over the next days, or weeks, several versions of the story going into the more and more depth, and I remember sort of sitting in that reading room, which is like really brightly lit, and freezing. It's so cold in there. And I remember like going through, reading through these records of her husband's death, and it was so, so powerful. So, yeah, like these primary sources that were in that collection were huge to me. I also, there's a small collection of Gallaudet's papers ^M00:05:06 I also went to Gallaudet University and accessed their collections, as well as researchers at Gallaudet. So, yeah, but the Library of Congress was my primary source for most of the primary documents. >> John Haskell: And the Gallaudet Collection at the Library, how did that connect to your research for this book? >> Katie Booth: Well, Gallaudet, in many ways, Edward Miner Gallaudet, he started out as a friend of Bell's and then ended up sort of as a foil. Gallaudet was really advocating for the use of sign language in deaf education, not necessarily to disclude the learning of speech but to work with both modes together, and Bell, increasingly, thought that sign language had no place in deaf education. That deaf children should be discouraged from using sign. He wasn't as hard-line as many people believe, but his impact was, the method as a whole became very focused on the perfection of speech, which was very counter to what Gallaudet believed. >> John Haskell: So, taking a step back, most of us think of Bell as the inventor of the telephone, of course, or if you've read Candice Millard, you might be aware that he was the guy, he used an early metal detector to try to find the bullet that ultimately killed Garfield. The the phone in the metal detector, they weren't necessarily the driving force in his research and work, were they? What was it that drove -- it wasn't the telephone itself that drove his research and work. Tell us a little bit about that. >> Katie Booth: Yeah, I mean, Bell was a scientist. He did enjoy his sort of scientific endeavors, but he said over and over and over again from a pretty young age, that the focus of his life's work was to teach deaf children to speak, and later, to lip read, as well. So, he wanted to remove sign language, essentially, to end the use of sign language by teaching children how to enunciate sounds, how to perceive sounds, the sounds of speech specifically. And yeah, that was really his focus. His work on the telephone both came out of those explorations and was something that he thought of very explicitly as something that had the potential to fund his future work for the deaf. He hoped that the telephone would bring him some financial stability, and that he could return to his true work. >> John Haskell: Give us some specifics about the kinds of things he was doing to, in his view, help deaf people. >> Katie Booth: Yeah, I mean, it started out that he was working one-on-one with deaf children, and he would sort of start his classes by drawing a diagram of the human face in profile and point out the different parts of the mouth that would create speech, and from that, he would start to teach deaf children how to manipulate their mouth to create different sounds. In order to do that, he was also using something called visible speech, which was a alphabet that his father had created, a phonetic alphabet. But then, as time went on, he focused more on teaching other teachers how to teach speech and more on the promotional end of the idea of oralism. And eventually, he ended up opening his own school, which ended up failing in a number of ways within about three years. ^M00:09:12 >> John Haskell: And so, you say his father was also interested in this area. So, what was it? Tell us a little bit about Bell's history that leads him to this interest. I mean, what was his education and what was his background? I mean, why is he in this place at the time? >> Katie Booth: Yeah, his education, he was not very good at school. He spent more of his education trying to escape his education, but his father was in elocutionist, a fairly famous one, as was his grandfather and his uncle. The character of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, or the play that became My Fair Lady, the character of Henry Higgins is actually based on Bell's -- but also, Bell's mother was deaf. ^M00:10:02 So, he had these two influences. His father was focused on sound, on elocution, and speech, but he was more focused on helping politicians or immigrants of means or actors learn how to speak more clearly. Whereas the influence of Bell's mother, I think, began to show Bell a little bit about what life was like for deaf people. His own mother lost her hearing post lingually, so, after she learned how to speak. And so, she continued to use speech throughout her day-to-day life, and because of that, she didn't appear to an outside observer to be different than other people, and that had a really big influence on what Bell thought could be helpful for deaf people. >> John Haskell: And so, in accounting for his interest in helping deaf people, and yet, you call it oralism. Maybe talk a little bit about that term and what it means today and what it might've meant at the time. >> Katie Booth: Sure. Oralism was the teaching of speech to deaf children, or to a deaf person, generally, but without the use of sign language, and also, including the use of lip reading, as well. So, the idea was, basically, that through oralism deaf people could sort of move through the world without drawing attention to their deafness, and this isn't spoken, but without needing accommodation for their deafness. What it really was doing was making things much easier for hearing people, or, that was the idea. And what ended up happening was that it was incredibly, incredibly difficult for the deaf child. It took years and years of labor, and it had a very low success rate. And during that time, because there was no use of sign language, there was a major sort of epidemic of deaf children not getting any language input during a crucial period. And so, you had widespread language deprivation, and frankly, in many ways, that situation continues today. Most deaf children still don't have access to sign language. There's still sort of this rampant idea of miracle cures that require supposedly very little effort on the part of either deaf people or hearing people. But typically, if there's a solution that requires no effort on the part of hearing people, there is often an incredible labor placed on the part of the deaf person, and that is erased by many of these sort of ideas. >> John Haskell: And so, you said, and your book goes into what you call the low success rate. I mean, why was this what he would call mainstreaming, I guess, if you were, today, when we might call mainstreaming? Why couldn't that work? Why couldn't oralism work? Was it just too hard for too many people? >> Katie Booth: I think it was really hard, yeah. Oralists, at the time, would often place the blame on teachers, but the truth is it's an incredibly difficult thing to ask of a deaf person to learn how to speak, and it is especially difficult to do that if you have, in the process of that type of education, removed language access from them, right? You have no way to communicate ideas with somebody who's been deprived of language. And so, you place the burden on this incredibly, incredibly difficult task and take away the thing that could both help learn that task and also help a child's mind develop at the same rate as hearing children who have language access. But because you're removing language access, you're changing the groundwork. You're changing the rules of the game, essentially. And I think that also had a major impact on the difficulty of accomplishing this almost preposterous task. I mean, it's not preposterous. Deaf people do learn how to speak. During Bell's time, the success rate was -- I mean, it depended I would study looked at, but it tended to be right around 10% of students who could speak in a way that was intelligible to strangers. ^M00:15:12 >> John Haskell: And lipreading is not exactly an exact science either, right? >> Katie Booth: No, that's another thing where there's a high level of guesswork, and a huge amount of labor. It's really, really hard to do for most people. And so, there's this uneven amount of work is getting put into communication, and most of that burden is falling on the deaf person in the system. >> John Haskell: So, when did sign language appear? I mean, it existed at that time, right? >> Katie Booth: Yes. >> John Haskell: So, give us a little bit about the history of that and why that wasn't, for whatever reason, why it wasn't appealing to Bell as the preferred method. >> Katie Booth: Sure. Sign language has just been around for, I think, probably for as long as deaf people and deaf communities have been around. In America, the sign language, American Sign Language that we use today had its roots in a lot of different languages. The Plains Indians had a sign language that influenced American Sign Language. Martha's Vineyard was a community, there was a really high rate of deafness on Martha's Vineyard. And so, there were towns it which everybody signed, including hearing people, and it was just sort of everyone's sort of bilingual. And so, they had their own form of sign language, Martha's Vineyard Sign Language. That influenced American Sign Language, but the way it started to really gel was the opening of the American School for the Deaf, in, I believe, 1816 or '17. And what happened was Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Edward's father, went to Europe to try to figure out the best way to teach deaf children And he met up with a deaf man, Laurent Clerc, in France. Well, technically, they met in England, but they went to France, and he came -- they came back together to open this school. And so, Laurent taught Thomas French Sign Language, and that became another major influence in American sign language. So, when at school opened, all of these different deaf people from all of these different deaf communities came together and sort of started to standardize a language. >> John Haskell: And so, by the time Bell was achieving his majority in, you know, in the working world trying to do this, it was well-established at that time, right? >> Katie Booth: Yes, yes, yes. He knew sign language. He was actually, when he moved to America, he took lessons from one of his students and became, by many people's reports, a really beautiful signer. He was really good at the language. >> John Haskell: Right. When we think about, you know, were the reasons it's important -- that your book is important is because you address the question of his legacy and the impact of what he did, since he was so influential. What was the impact of his -- or what were, I guess I should say, the impacts of his efforts to mainstream, and the way he would look at it, to push oralism? >> Katie Booth: I mean, there's a lot of impact. I mean, there's many layers to this legacy. I think one thing that has happened is widespread language deprivation in the deaf community, because there is so much effort to alienate deaf children from sign language still today. Still today, that happens. It's fewer than 10% of deaf children who have access to sign language in their homes, and also, fewer than 10% who have access to sign language in their schools. So, we still have widespread oppression -- or suppression of sign language, and we also have widespread language deprivation. That's something that comes out of this legacy of oralism. But the broader thing that I think feels like it comes out of this legacy is this idea of sort of -- I mean, my book is called The Invention of Miracles, and part of the reason why is I wanted to draw attention to this idea of what a miracle is. It's an idea that's often used to describe deaf people who have put in tremendous work, in order to remove the labor from hearing people, so that people can communicate. ^M00:20:14 And so, the idea of that being effortless for the deaf person, the erasure of that labor, that is also Bell's legacy. This idea that hearing people don't have to do any work, that hearing institutions don't have to do any work, and that all of this effort comes from the deaf person. That, too, is part of the legacy of Alexander Graham Bell. >> John Haskell: So, I mean, that's an astonishing figure you gave a minute ago, that only 10% of deaf children have access in their homes or at school to sign language. >> John Haskell: Fewer than 10%. >> John Haskell: Fewer than 10%. I mean, I think that surprises a lot of people when they hear that. What accounts for that? You know, I might have, at first blush, assumed it was much higher than that, and that would be much more broadly available. >> Katie Booth: I mean, and it comes out of this -- I mean, the ideas of oralism didn't. end. They got transformed in different ways, and I think part of what happens is -- I mean, there's a wide system in place that funnels deaf children towards English-based educations in a lot of different ways. Some of it comes through the cochlear implant industry, which I am not speaking against cochlear implants. That's not my job or my vision. That's not what I'm saying, but it is true that there's impact that comes out of that field that true is to make an argument that, essentially, if deaf children have access to sign language, they wont try to learn English. They will just use sign language, and they wont' put in the effort, and therefore, they'll never learn English. That's an argument that's been made since Bell's time, and it's not true. The evidence isn't there, and it is true that removing sign language from deaf children creates higher instances -- actually, I shouldn't say this, certainly, because I'm not entirely sure, but there's a lot of evidence that suggests that removing sign language access from deaf children and insisting on English is part of what is creating this epidemic of language deprivation in the community. Wyatt Hall is really amazing researcher who's done a lot of work on this subject, Sanjay Gulati. There's a lot of people in the deaf community doing a lot of work in this field. Naomi Castelli [assumed spelling], I think is her name. There's a bunch of people doing work on language deprivation specifically right now, and that's part of what's going on. This idea that you have to learn English without sign language is -- it's creating a situation in which the only language offered to a deaf child is one that's not immediately accessible. So. >> John Haskell: Yeah, you know, and what ran through my mind when I was reading your book, when these issues that you're describing come up is how most of us think that being bilingual is a great thing. That, you know, you might wish that you knew Spanish or French or Italian or something or Chinese or whatever the language would be, and that that would be a feather in your cap. And it is, and, on the other hand, for deaf people, it seems not to be the case. Am I missing something there? >> Katie Booth: No, I mean, there's deep contradictions here, right? Like we have this idea of, specifically, ever since it was in the early 90s, the idea of baby signs came into the world, and this was an idea that was spearheaded by hearing people, by, I believe, two hearing women. And they made this argument that sign language is really good for babies, which is true. That babies are able to express themselves earlier through sign language than they are through English or spoken language. And so, we had this idea that sign language was great for babies and sign language started being taught to hearing children all over the country. And yet, at the same time, and the child is deaf, suddenly the argument is different. ^M00:25:26 Suddenly, sign language is bad and needs to be restricted. So, you have a real double standard here. Bilingualism is great for hearing people but not for deaf children, because sign language is going to be a problem for deaf children. And it's not true. You're absolutely right. Like bilingualism is a good thing, but whenever you have a language that is seen as inferior, then -- or a group that is seen as a minority, whether or not they are, what you have is a perception that certain languages are damaging. ^M00:26:17 You see this with Spanish in America that, too, right? Like in Spanish-speaking communities, the idea of teaching children Spanish from, I don't know, from our institutions, is often looked down upon. But in a, you know, a white community, it might be seen as a good thing to learn. So, there's a lot of prejudice mixed in with language, and you see that very much in the double standards about whether or not sign language is good for children. It's seen as good for hearing children and bad for deaf children, and what that does is, essentially, take the deaf community's greatest asset and give it to hearing children while depriving it from deaf children, which is a really horrific thing to do. >> John Haskell: You know, in your book, what is, you know, to me, a clear kind of take away, so to speak, is that given your personal experience that you described earlier and your family connection here, that these issues have real impact, you know, on real people. It's not a dispassionate study. Your book is isn't that. Would you like your -- the main take away, the key lesson, to be from your book? >> Katie Booth: Well, it's interesting, because the book is very much about a topic and a topic that I care about very much, but it's also a story, right? And so, I hope it is read as a story would be read, and therefore, something that contains a lot of complexity, a lot of layers. As for a take away, I think an acknowledgment of how much work deaf people are constantly having to put into just trying to gain basic access to things that hearing people never have to think about and acknowledgment of that work, and also, an effort on the part of us as hearing people and hearing institutions to alleviate the burden as much as possible. We often unthinkingly pile onto that burden, and we do this in a number of small ways and big ways, often through language and removal of access to language. And so, I think being a little bit more perceptive of how much work is going into basic communication on the part of deaf people, and then, efforts to make that easier, not harder. >> John Haskell: I want to finish with a challenging question, I think. Your book has gotten outstanding reviews. I've read pretty much all of them you can find out there. But the reviewer in one largely positive take on the book said the following. "Bell's wish that everyone understand everyone came at a terrible price, but it was a product of its time." That were reviewer went onto say that you applied present standards to the past. What's your response? >> Katie Booth: Just a nice, easy want to go out on, huh? >> John Haskell: I know. >> Katie Booth: I understand where they're coming from, and it was a question that I spent a lot of time with as I was writing the book. It was something that I thought about a lot. From the very earliest days of me working on this book, I was thinking about what it meant to take these questions back into the past, and if that was fair. And I think there is that argument to be made in certain situations, in certain cases, right? That we are applying present standards to the past. Making that argument assumes a few things that I don't think are true here and that I think are generally dangerous. One is the most fundamental one, is the erasure of voices of resistance, which often come from marginalized communities. To say that nobody was opposing this idea is to just flatly erase a huge amount of deaf resistance from the 19th century, from the very earliest days of oralism. ^M00:31:02 And I think to do that is wrong. It's to perpetuate a history that is excluding the people that it's talking about from its narrative, which is a huge problem. The other part of it is the idea that we are just holding someone accountable to standards that weren't present at the time. That idea is dependent on the assumption that that person didn't know the larger discourse about the topic, and that, again, is not true. Bell knew. Bell was connected to these communities. He knew about the resistance. He was publishing in these publications. He was reading this stuff. He was talking to people. He understood the resistance, and he turned away from it, again, and again, and again, and increasingly in his life turned away from it. Not exclusively. There were times when he moved towards complexity, but large-scale, in terms of oralism, at least, he didn't back down. He didn't really integrate the ideas that people were presenting him with, the resistance that people were having towards oralism, and instead, he turned away from them. He dismissed them. And so, that's why I think we can hold him accountable to that. Bell is complex. He has a lot of things inside of him. He has a lot of good. He has a lot of really not good, and all of these things can be true at once, and I think they are> And I think that holding him accountable is to honor the community that he was influencing, and I think we have to do that. >> John Haskell: Well, Katie, thank you very much for being a part of our Kluge Book Conversation Series, and we look forward to seeing you at the Library maybe on your next project. >> Katie Booth: Thanks, John. Thank you for having me. ^M00:33:12 [ Music ] ^E00:33:19