Memoir Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race

Washington: National Academy of Sciences, 1884. First edition.
MONOGRAPH ON GENETICS OF DEAFNESS BY INVENTOR OF THE TELEPHONE AND LEADER OF EUGENICS.
23x29.5 cm hardcover, publisher's brown cloth binding with gilt title to cover, 86 pp., 26 tables, folding graph. Wear to cover edges, front hinge starting, pages lightly browned; binding tight, pages clean and unmarked; very good minus in custom archival mylar cover.
From Alexander Graham Bell and His Role in Oral Education by Brian H. Greenwald, Ph.D., Gallaudet University, "Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847, the second of 3 children, in Edinburgh, Scotland to Melville and Eliza Bell. Bell's mother was deaf, and Bell's father and grandfather, also named Alexander Bell, were elocutionists specializing in voice presentation, delivery, and other aspects of speech teaching. Bell's two siblings succumbed to tuberculosis causing Melville Bell in 1870 to relocate the family to Brantford, Ontario, a supposedly more healthful climate to protect his sole surviving child. Bell's 1883 speech to the National Academy of Sciences, published in 1884 as Memoir Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race (offered here), was another call to promote oralism. Bell noted that deaf people tended to marry each other, and he argued that if they continued this pattern, a deaf variety of the human race would form at a critical period in American history. Bell identified signing residential schools, deaf newspapers, clubs, and associations as factors that encouraged the use of sign language and deaf intermarriage. He suggested preventive measures to dissuade the transmission of hereditary deafness. These included removing sign language from the residential schools, replacing deaf faculty with hearing teachers and staff, and establishing non-residential day schools or schools that would partially integrate deaf and hearing students. Many school boards and state legislatures heeded Bell and other oralists in their campaign to remove sign language from schools. This attempt at assimilation found a receptive audience in Progressive Era America, which was already anxious about the integration of immigrants.
From XTimeline.com: "Along with many very prominent thinkers and scientists of the time, Bell was connected with the eugenics movement in the United States. In 1921, he was the honorary president of the Second International Congress of Eugenics. Organizations such as these advocated passing laws (with success in some states) that established the compulsory sterilization of people deemed to be, as Bell called them, a "defective variety of the human race". His ideas about people he considered defective centered on the deaf. This was because of his feelings for his deaf family and his contact with deaf education. In addition to advocating sterilization of the deaf, Bell wished to prohibit deaf teachers from being allowed to teach in schools for the deaf. He worked to outlaw the marriage of deaf individuals to one another, and he was an ardent supporter of oralism over the use of sign language to educate deaf students. His avowed goal was to eradicate the language and culture of the deaf so as to encourage them to assimilate into the hearing culture, for their own long-term benefit and for the benefit of society at large. Although he supported what some consider harsh and inhumane policies today, he was not unkind to deaf individuals who supported his theories of oralism. He was a personal and longtime friend of Helen Keller, and his wife Mabel was deaf (none of their children were). By the late 1930s, about half the states in the U.S. had eugenics laws, and the California laws were used as a model for eugenics laws in Nazi Germany." From PBS.org: "In 1884, Bell published a paper "Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race," in which he warned of a "great calamity" facing the nation: deaf people were forming clubs, socializing with one another and, consequently, marrying other deaf people. The creation of a "deaf race" that yearly would grow larger and more insular was underway. Bell noted that "a special language adapted for the use of such a race" already was in existence, "a language as different from English as French or German or Russian." Some eugenicists called for legislation outlawing intermarriage by deaf people, but Bell rejected such a ban as impractical. Instead he proposed the following steps: "(1) Determine the causes that promote intermarriages among the deaf and dumb; and (2) remove them. The causes he sought to remove were sign language, deaf teachers, and residential schools. His solution was the creation of special day schools taught by hearing teachers who would enforce a ban on sign language." (Inventory #: 1685)