Interpreting our Disabled Heritage: Disability and the National Park Service

16 March 2021 – Perri Meldon

For nearly four years, I have collaborated with the National Park Service to embrace the culture and history of people with disabilities represented by its 400+ parks, historic sites, monuments, and battlefields. During my summer 2020 internship with the NPS, I contributed to this effort by writing an annotated bibliography on American disability history. In this blog post, I reflect on the process of developing this bibliography amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, nationwide protests against policy brutality, and the Black Lives Matter movement. During these turbulent times, I prioritized an intersectional approach to the scholarship, one that underscored the importance of asking: How do we historically situate disability as both an identity and a medical diagnosis with regard to gender, race, ethnicity, and class, without re-pathologizing disability today? Answering this question (or, at least, striving for answers) is critical as the National Park Service interprets this complex history.

This 1923 photograph depicts men assembling a motor at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, Michigan. As historian Sarah Rose documents in her 2017 book No Right to be Idle, nearly one-third of Ford employees were disabled. NPS sites, such as Motor Cities National Heritage Area in Michigan, can incorporate disability histories into their place-based interpretation. Photo Credit (Public Domain): “[Installing a motor],” Detroit Publishing Co. (May 28, 1923). Photograph Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (Washington, D.C.). Public Domain, Accessed 16 February 2021, https://www.loc.gov/item/2016817048/.

The decision to develop this bibliography resulted from conversations between my supervisors with the NPS Accessibility Program and National Historic Landmarks Program, Chief Historian Dr. Turkiya Lowe and Staff Historian Dr. Lu Ann Jones. Together they agreed to lay the foundations for a handbook that will offer guidance on place-based disability history and culture for park staff. Handbooks, which are like theme studies but shorter in length, are intended to be in-depth guides on topics such as the 19^th Amendment, LGBTQ history, and the Reconstruction era.

We decided that an annotated bibliography was necessary to prepare for this handbook. By identifying critical scholarship in disability history and disability studies, we could then seek subject-matter expertise to consult on this NPS handbook project. I chose to read these texts through the lens of disability as an identity first and a medical diagnosis second. Beyond the fact that this is an accepted framework for understanding disability today, it also acknowledges the shifting nature of disability both geographically and temporally. This lens recognizes that elements of race, gender, ethnicity, and class have all been historically pathologized by power-holding, white, western, heteronormative populations with enduring legacies. Disability is often the shared denominator for people who—both historically and today—are not guaranteed the full rights of citizenship. According to some scholars, disability is the ultimate marker of intersectionality.

Cultural representations of disabled people do not always reflect the latest scholarship, an important consideration for parks that both welcome disabled visitors and interpret the lives of people with disabilities in the past, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt.  In outdated representations, narratives can perpetuate harmful depictions of individuals, such as FDR, as a “supercrip,”—someone who is defined by their disability (in FDR’s case, polio) and their ability to supposedly overcome an affliction. Rather, specific racial and socioeconomic conditions often enable these so-called “supercrips” to achieve certain levels of potential and publicity. These narratives flatten the complexity of these individuals’ lived experiences and reduce them to objects of inspiration and pity, at the same time that they inflict pressure and unrealistic expectations upon those who live with disabilities today. They uphold stereotypical interpretations of disability, requiring pushback against the perceived lack that non-disabled peoples assume of disabled communities. For this reason, it is necessary for the NPS, in its commitment to telling all Americans’ stories, to interpret nuanced narratives that articulate the complexities of disability across place and time.

Disability is a social and cultural construct, but it is also a real lived experience for a quarter of the American population today. Disabilities include conditions that impact sensory, mental, physical, intellectual, developmental, and acquired conditions. Furthermore, disabilities can be both visible, like corporeal differences, and invisible, such as mental illness. And while the saying goes that “Anyone who lives long enough will become disabled” is often true, it is also factual that people who are lower-income and non-white face higher percentages of disability than those who are financially comfortable and white. Recognition of the structural conditions that shape the lives of people with disabilities and at times create disabling circumstances are essential to interpreting American disability history, particularly at museums and historic sites.

The National Park Service provides the perfect venue for interpreting such histories. For example, Motor Cities National Heritage Area in Michigan could integrate a disability lens to their representations of labor and capital. Nearly one-third of those employed at Ford Motor Company in 1919 had physical and sensory disabilities, a staggering statistic when many workplaces at the time barred employment for people with disabilities. How might the stories of disabled workers shed light on labor conditions and employment laws today? Furthermore, sites of immigration history, such as Ellis Island at Statue of Liberty National Monument, can bridge connections between historic and present-day policies. Immigration officers at Ellis Island banned people with real and perceived disabilities from entering the U.S. out of fear that such individuals posed a “public charge” risk, a policy first issued in 1891. Considerations of this policy resonate today, as with the 2020 re-introduction of public charge criteria in immigration law (and the more recent planned rollback of that rule by the Biden administration). For more on the disability histories of labor and immigration, readers will find Sarah Rose’s No Right to be Idle and Douglas Baynton’s Defectives in the Land insightful.

As I continue to reflect on potential interpretive paths the NPS could pursue, I find my recommendations influenced by the present moment. As the pandemic wears on, we know it will have debilitating effects on those who contracted the coronavirus and their loved ones. The virus can cause long-term health conditions, including lung, heart, and brain damage. This is not to mention the deleterious mental health issues that are exacerbated by social distancing, isolation, and loss. Furthermore, as we witness one after another heartbreaking act of white supremacy and police brutality, we must remember that those who survive these acts of violence, like Jacob Blake, will live with permanent scars. Blake, paralyzed from the waist down, is now a disabled Black man.

Awareness of the intersecting processes of ableism and racialization is critical for the National Park Service. In curating stories both in person and virtually during the pandemic, the agency must attend to such processes as they construct narratives for public consumption.

~Perri Meldon studies public history and federal land management in Boston University’s American and New England Studies doctoral program. She can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @perri_mel.