Speaker 1: M any. Imagine you're at the Kansas State Fair in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties. Much of what you would see there
Speaker 1: would look familiar today. There's cooking competitions and kids running
Speaker 1: around the fairgrounds, and when night comes, maybe a big
Speaker 1: fireworks display. Farm families are arriving from all over the
Speaker 1: place to ride on the rides, watch the races, and
Speaker 1: of course to show off their livestole. But starting in
Speaker 1: there's another ferrament, which in today's perspective really seems hard
Speaker 1: to believe. Along with the pigs and cows competing for ribbons,
Speaker 1: there are entire human families being judged. Urine is tested
Speaker 1: ever broken, any bones, skulls are measured, how often do
Speaker 1: you bathe? The jewel teeth are evaluated open please. Judges
Speaker 1: ask questions about childhood diseases. Mothers are giving the judges
Speaker 1: a list of the meals they give their kids every day.
Speaker 1: Every family member is observed chewing food, and the judges
Speaker 1: are there taking notes down on all of this. There's
Speaker 1: a written i Q test for children and parents, and
Speaker 1: for good measure, a syphilis test. Rounds out the experience.
Speaker 1: This whole thing. It's called a Fitter Family Contest and
Speaker 1: they have a really specific social purpose for the nine twenties.
Speaker 1: They're designed to get across a message to the masses
Speaker 1: that human genetics determines all that is good and evil
Speaker 1: about modern American society. Put simply, some people shouldn't reproduce,
Speaker 1: some people should never be born. And in this podcast,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about one family from Mrs Hippy
Speaker 1: who if they had gone before those judges back in
Speaker 1: that era, they would have been judged defective or low grade,
Speaker 1: which were terms actually used in those days, and therefore
Speaker 1: they would have been deemed unworthy of breeding. That's because
Speaker 1: they had a little boy named Donald who was exhibiting
Speaker 1: certain unexpected and inexplicable behaviors. He was different. But the
Speaker 1: determination of Donald's mom and dad to make sense of
Speaker 1: his differences and their certainty that he deserved a place
Speaker 1: in this world, well, it will change not only Donald's life,
Speaker 1: but all of our lives. For I Heeart Podcasts, I'm
Speaker 1: John don Van and I'm Karen Zucker. This is Autism's
Speaker 1: first Child and I heart original podcast and this is
Speaker 1: episode one Fitter Families. Twenty years ago, my journalism career
Speaker 1: took an unexpected turn at the time, I was working
Speaker 1: as a general assignment reporter at ABC News, and I
Speaker 1: had spent years covering wars and famine and political upheaval.
Speaker 1: ABC's John don Van begins our series with the analysis
Speaker 1: what we saw in last night's presidential debate with John Donvan,
Speaker 1: ABC eight point nine Magnitude Epicenter of fifteen miles below ground.
Speaker 1: One of my colleagues, a producer I worked with a lot,
Speaker 1: learned that her two year old son, Mickey, had autism.
Speaker 1: Here's Karen, So. My son, Mickey was in the Special
Speaker 1: Tiddler program at Barnard College, where kids from eighteen to
Speaker 1: thirty six months went to school. The very first day
Speaker 1: we went, my husband and I were sitting in this
Speaker 1: two way mirror and there are twelve or thirteen kids,
Speaker 1: you know, they're all playing, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: the teachers said, everybody go sit down and get some
Speaker 1: juice and crackers. So eleven of those kids went down
Speaker 1: and sat at the table to get their juicing crackers,
Speaker 1: and there was Mickey in the corner with his shoes
Speaker 1: and off dancing to the music. As soon as you
Speaker 1: saw him with other children, educators who knew autism could
Speaker 1: tell that he was different. We thought he was different
Speaker 1: because he was reading in one and a half and
Speaker 1: we knew we went to a different drummer, but we
Speaker 1: just sort of thought he was brilliant. We didn't know
Speaker 1: how different he was, and they suggested he get evaluated,
Speaker 1: and six weeks later he was diagnosed with autism. Mickey's
Speaker 1: diagnosis turned Karen's life completely upside down. Before that, you know,
Speaker 1: she was one of the networks up and coming producers, definitely,
Speaker 1: and she was we thought bound to be one of
Speaker 1: the people the rest of us would end up working
Speaker 1: for it the network. Well not quite. But the very
Speaker 1: first interview I ever did as a journalist was with
Speaker 1: Rosa Parks. So in the early days, I thought I
Speaker 1: was off to a good start. I covered politics, I
Speaker 1: went overseas to help cover the go for the Barcelona Olympics.
Speaker 1: It was a good run. So it was a shock
Speaker 1: to everybody out of nowhere, this incredible journalist that you
Speaker 1: were known to be. Karen, you know, just stepped off
Speaker 1: the fast track. You went from working full time to
Speaker 1: working part time. Yeah, my boss had offered me a
Speaker 1: job share because he didn't want to lose me, and
Speaker 1: he knew that I'd give a hundred. And I was
Speaker 1: really really fortunate because I was able to keep my
Speaker 1: hand in the news business. And I was even more
Speaker 1: fortunate because I was able to use the skill of
Speaker 1: journalism as a way to figure out what to do
Speaker 1: for Mickey and to educate others about autism and share
Speaker 1: it with the world, because at this time, when people
Speaker 1: heard the word autism, everybody still thought one thing, and
Speaker 1: that was rain Man. He's particular case. He's pretty well off.
Speaker 1: He's very high functionate. Most autistics they can't speak and
Speaker 1: they can't communicate, right, Yeah, do you know what autistic is? Yeah?
Speaker 1: You know that were Yeah? Are you autistic? I don't
Speaker 1: think so. No. Not getting a network to agree to
Speaker 1: do a half an hour on a topic that honestly,
Speaker 1: most people still have never heard of in the um
Speaker 1: that took a lot of uh, let's say, push, and
Speaker 1: Karen is a bulldog. She pushed and she convinced Nightline
Speaker 1: to let us do it. We were the first team
Speaker 1: in network news to make reporting about autism into an
Speaker 1: actual beat. Those first autism stories that we did together
Speaker 1: put me into a more intimate kind of connection with
Speaker 1: the people I was reporting on that I was actually
Speaker 1: used to. You know, you can do war reporting in
Speaker 1: this kind of big picture way, and most of the
Speaker 1: time that's how it happens. You're telling this story of
Speaker 1: a whole city under siege or a whole army of soldiers.
Speaker 1: But this reporting on autism was always very close up
Speaker 1: and very intimate and focused on individuals and their families,
Speaker 1: and it was very internal. It was about the feelings
Speaker 1: of people on the spectrum and their parents who often
Speaker 1: when their kids were first diagnosed, were confused and frightened
Speaker 1: and having to adjust to this new normal for their kids.
Speaker 1: I had some experience with autism, my brother in law
Speaker 1: has autism, but it didn't prepare me for this kind
Speaker 1: of reporting. That first story, Karen and I told we
Speaker 1: did it very honestly and it had a big impact
Speaker 1: in the autism community. And after that, Karen asked me
Speaker 1: to do another story, and then another, and we created
Speaker 1: this series called Still Unexplained Wave of Autism that began
Speaker 1: in the US in the ninety nine with an estimated
Speaker 1: five hundred thousand kids in the US with autism. Today,
Speaker 1: there are we reported on girls with autism, adults with autism, siblings,
Speaker 1: how kids with autism, or bully. So we've been covering
Speaker 1: autism together for television for seven years, and now seven
Speaker 1: years in we're hard at work on a book about
Speaker 1: the history of the diagnosis, and the research for that
Speaker 1: brought us into close contact with the work of a
Speaker 1: doctor named Leo Connor, a child psychiatrist, and we're going
Speaker 1: to get deeper into Connor's life in our next episode.
Speaker 1: But in three Dr Connor published a landmark paper that
Speaker 1: described a neurological disorder that, as he put it, had
Speaker 1: not previously been described. He called it autistic disturbances of
Speaker 1: effective contact. And in that article he defined what we
Speaker 1: all today recognized as autism. And he included case studies
Speaker 1: of eleven children, and here's how he described their symptoms.
Speaker 1: The disinterest in people, the obsession with objects, the deep
Speaker 1: need for sameness and routine, the detachment and inaccessibility to
Speaker 1: other us. Connor also made observations at his clinic at
Speaker 1: Johns Hopkins of these kids directly. But from the beginning,
Speaker 1: Karen and I were drawn to the first case described
Speaker 1: in this study, literally called case one, Donald, last name
Speaker 1: initial T, Donald T. We started to wonder if he
Speaker 1: was still alive. Meeting Donald would be meeting history. In
Speaker 1: his case studying on Donald T, Connor mentions a birthdate
Speaker 1: September eight. I turned up a speech that Connor gave
Speaker 1: one where he mentions that Donald lives in a little
Speaker 1: town in Mississippi called Forest. First name, last, initial birthday location.
Speaker 1: That's more than enough to track a person down. So
Speaker 1: we did some sleuthing and came up with what we
Speaker 1: thought was going to be Donald's phone number, and Karen
Speaker 1: is the one who dialed in an answering machine picked out.
Speaker 1: Once I heard the message, I knew it was him.
Speaker 1: I called John and said I found him. I found
Speaker 1: Donald T. After the break will investigate a wildly popular
Speaker 1: turn of the century scientific blue to breed better humans,
Speaker 1: and how that science led to the institutionalization, sterilization, even
Speaker 1: the euthanasia of scores of children like Donald. Our quest
Speaker 1: to understand autisms case number one, and what his life
Speaker 1: was like and what the world that he grew up
Speaker 1: and was like it actually begins well before Donald T
Speaker 1: is born. I don't think people are that familiar with
Speaker 1: the fact that from really the early nineteen hundreds up
Speaker 1: until the beginning of World War two, essentially jendaics was
Speaker 1: really a big movement to the United States swept the country.
Speaker 1: As here's Adam Cohen, eugenics historian, author of the book Imbeciles.
Speaker 1: It was an euro of science and it was a
Speaker 1: progressive Here also, humans emerged from this evolutionary process. What
Speaker 1: if we tried to take a more active role in it.
Speaker 1: What if he tried to focus on good genes and
Speaker 1: do that to make better people, sort of like farmers
Speaker 1: have been doing for millennia by trying to breed better cattle.
Speaker 1: Even before those Fitter Family contests started popping up at
Speaker 1: state fairs, there was something called the Better Babies movement
Speaker 1: that got a hold on American culture around the turn
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century. Better Babies kicks off with the
Speaker 1: contest at the Louisiana State Fair. In night. Tourists are
Speaker 1: filing through an exhibition hall and watching as nurses and
Speaker 1: white gowns and cardboard caps weigh and measure and inspect
Speaker 1: these little, tiny babies, and the baby judged to be
Speaker 1: the healthiest and the strongest and the most scientifically raised,
Speaker 1: that baby is awarded a silver trophy. There was oddly
Speaker 1: some very positive intent behind it, right. I mean, this
Speaker 1: was the time when medical education wasn't widespread, particularly in
Speaker 1: rural areas. People didn't have the information now have about
Speaker 1: baby Herring. Doctor's Fox book hadn't been written yet, there
Speaker 1: wasn't Google to search you know, what to do when babies,
Speaker 1: cology and things like that. So some of this is informational.
Speaker 1: It's trying to help people with a difficult thing of
Speaker 1: raising a child and a roll with information. But because
Speaker 1: of the Women's Home Companion, which was a really popular magazine,
Speaker 1: coops this whole idea and forms the Better Babies Bureau
Speaker 1: and practically no time you can find a Better Baby event.
Speaker 1: In forty states, thousands of bombs enter their children. There's
Speaker 1: something really fun about it. It's like the ultimate soap
Speaker 1: bucks derby. Winning comes with incredible bragging rights. In Iowa,
Speaker 1: the contests are run by a woman named Mary T. Watts,
Speaker 1: matronly present, snowy white hair pulled back in a bun
Speaker 1: rigid posture. She's perpetually draped in these long pearls that
Speaker 1: swing to her waist. Shortly after starting Better Babies i
Speaker 1: a chapter Watch receives a postcard signed by a man
Speaker 1: named Charles Davenport, who tells her she is missing one
Speaker 1: important measurement. You should give fifty to hereditary before you
Speaker 1: begin to score a baby. Watch doesn't know it just yet,
Speaker 1: but in the field of eugenics, Davenport is a serious player.
Speaker 1: Wats forgets all about the postcard until the following year,
Speaker 1: when Davenport sends another note a prize winner at two,
Speaker 1: maybe an epileptic at ten, And now Watch is convinced.
Speaker 1: She decides to insert heredity tests into the contests forget
Speaker 1: better babies. Now it's fitter Families. It takes six years
Speaker 1: for Wats to get the fitter Famili's concept off the ground.
Speaker 1: Experts doubt that any educated, self respecting adult will submit
Speaker 1: willingly to physical exams at a county fair. Who on
Speaker 1: earth would be open to the syphilis test. There was
Speaker 1: really many attempts to bring the high flutent ideas of
Speaker 1: eugenics to the people. Measure people's skulls to see like
Speaker 1: how large they were and how big the brain would be.
Speaker 1: So they're doing that kind of quote scientific work. The
Speaker 1: first Fitter Families for Fireside Chats competition is held in
Speaker 1: a Kansas agricultural fair. Twenty families compete. Early competitions are
Speaker 1: such a success that Watts takes the show on the road.
Speaker 1: The contests are always time to overlap with the main event,
Speaker 1: the livestock contests. Farmers truck in their best looking cattle,
Speaker 1: and there are most perfect pigs to compete for the
Speaker 1: blue ribbons. Better bred animals, when crossed again and again,
Speaker 1: lead to unending improvement in the stock of the breed.
Speaker 1: Mrs Watts has the same goal for humans. While the
Speaker 1: judges are testing the Holstein's jerseys and white faces, we
Speaker 1: are testing the Joneses, Smith's and the Johnson's. When Mrs
Speaker 1: Watts found a winner like the Kelly family of Isle
Speaker 1: of Hope, Georgia, which she referred to as being of
Speaker 1: the highest type, she meant that the Kelly's were the
Speaker 1: sort of Americans who should be encouraged, exhorted even to reproduce. Meantime,
Speaker 1: all the information that we collect on your family is
Speaker 1: going to be stored at the Eugenics Record Office in
Speaker 1: cold Spring Harbor. That's Dr Laura Lovett, historian, professor and author,
Speaker 1: and it's going to allow for a kind of what
Speaker 1: they imagined would be a control of the entire population
Speaker 1: around genetic predispositions. This was actually quite widespread In the
Speaker 1: nineteen tens and nine twenties, The New York Times ran
Speaker 1: a favorable feature about the Eugenics Record Office and how
Speaker 1: people could take eugenics into account in deciding who to marry.
Speaker 1: Back at the state fair, a sign at the competition
Speaker 1: booth carries an urgent warning every forty eight seconds of
Speaker 1: person is born in the United States who will never
Speaker 1: grow up mentally beyond that stage of a normal eight
Speaker 1: year old boy or girl. A second sign adds perspective
Speaker 1: every fifteen seconds, a hundred dollars if your money goes
Speaker 1: for the care of persons with bad heredits, such as
Speaker 1: the insane, a feeble mind, criminals, and other defectives. And
Speaker 1: the third sign offers hope. Every seven and a half minutes,
Speaker 1: a high grade person is born. Good heredity is falling
Speaker 1: behind at an alarming rate. They warn small town newspaper
Speaker 1: editors decide the fittest families make for great copy, and
Speaker 1: they spread the word about eugenics. Now in the broader
Speaker 1: eugenics movement, Mrs Watts is really just a bit player.
Speaker 1: She's not a scientist, she's not an academic, she's not
Speaker 1: a statesman. Her operation really is the extreme retail end
Speaker 1: of eugenics, a scientific, political, and philosophical movement that dedicated
Speaker 1: itself as one adherent put it to iron up the
Speaker 1: springs that feed the torrent of defective and degenerate protoplasm.
Speaker 1: But scientists, academics, and statesman are well represented in the
Speaker 1: eugenics movement at Harvard and at Yale, in the pages
Speaker 1: of Scientific American, and in the New York Times. Powerful
Speaker 1: people like Alexander Graham Bell embraced this brand new so
Speaker 1: called science, and John D. Rockefeller eugenic starts to creep
Speaker 1: into public schools. President Teddy Roosevelt is a big fan
Speaker 1: of this book, called the Passing of the Great Race,
Speaker 1: a rigid system of selection through the elimination of those
Speaker 1: who are a weak or unfit. In other words, social
Speaker 1: failures would solve the whole question in one hundred years.
Speaker 1: The book's author is a man named Madison Grant, who
Speaker 1: is widely respected at the time. He's the founder of
Speaker 1: the American Museum of Natural History. He's a really major
Speaker 1: conservationist and a very high ranking member of polite New
Speaker 1: York Society. He gets a lot of fan letters from
Speaker 1: all over the place. One of them came from Austria,
Speaker 1: from a young man who wrote to Grant that the
Speaker 1: book is now his Bible. This young Austrian man's name
Speaker 1: Half Help. And we know what the Nazis did with
Speaker 1: these ideas. They set up the Rice Committee for the
Speaker 1: Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses. It sounds
Speaker 1: very bureaucratic, but it's basically a child killing organization. Under
Speaker 1: this program, children three and under with any number of
Speaker 1: congenital disorders are condemned to be euthanized. Years before the Nazis,
Speaker 1: eugenics had crept into American society in some very dark ways.
Speaker 1: There are already institutions across the country where epileptic and
Speaker 1: the intellectually disabled or kept separated from society. But now
Speaker 1: more than half the states began to allow forced sterilization
Speaker 1: of these individuals. Here's Dr Lovett. Often in those asylums
Speaker 1: where sterilization, without any any information, any conversation takes place,
Speaker 1: and those depend on the states. Indiana is one of
Speaker 1: the first ones to introduce the sterilization law. Eight is
Speaker 1: going to focus predominantly on mail inmates. California, for example,
Speaker 1: and part of this has to do with that First
Speaker 1: World War decides that, in fact, it's going to sterilize
Speaker 1: as many women as men, and it sterilizes women who
Speaker 1: wind up in what we're called feeble minded institutions. A
Speaker 1: false assumption has now taken hold that there's a meaningful
Speaker 1: relationship between somebody's i Q and that person's ability to
Speaker 1: be a contributing and law abid fighting and moral member
Speaker 1: of society. Lower i Q was thought to define an
Speaker 1: undesirable sort of person, and so they imagine then that
Speaker 1: the way to prevent further reproduction of lower i Q
Speaker 1: or people minded individuals was to sterilize them. And so California,
Speaker 1: for example, winds up sterilizing as many women as men
Speaker 1: were as in Indiana. Partics predominant emails in Margaret Sanger
Speaker 1: tells a Vasster College audience, this is the founder of
Speaker 1: planned parenthood, right right, This is what she tells an
Speaker 1: audience of young women. The American public is taxed, heavily
Speaker 1: taxed to maintain an increasing race of morons, which threatens
Speaker 1: the very foundations of our civilization. The very next year,
Speaker 1: the United States Supreme Court, here's a case called Buck
Speaker 1: versus Bell addressing the constitutionality of Virginia's eugenical Sterilization Act.
Speaker 1: Carrie Books story could be a podcast all its own.
Speaker 1: The state decides to sterilize Carrie Buck, even though there's
Speaker 1: nothing wrong with her. She doesn't suffer from any sort
Speaker 1: of malady. She's just a poor teenage mother with a
Speaker 1: sixth grade education. Eugenics depends heavily on i Q tests.
Speaker 1: Carrie Buck is classified as quote middle grade moron, a
Speaker 1: technical classification that they actually used based on the intelligence scale,
Speaker 1: but still put her above the levels of idiot and imbecile,
Speaker 1: which were also terms that they actually used. Morons again,
Speaker 1: that's how Carrie was rated. Are considered dangerous people. They're
Speaker 1: smart enough to pass undetected and even to breed with
Speaker 1: their so called superiors. Carrie, who is an unmarried teenager,
Speaker 1: has a child, which to the experts back then, indicated
Speaker 1: heightened sexuality and fertility, both said to be common among
Speaker 1: the so called mentally deficient. It was really a nightmare
Speaker 1: tangle of measurements, classifications, assumptions, and prejudices. The Supreme Court
Speaker 1: rules eight to one that the statute doesn't violate the
Speaker 1: due process cause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This decision clears
Speaker 1: the way for the forced sterilization of some seventy thousand Americans.
Speaker 1: Some people want to go beyond for sterilizations. They want
Speaker 1: to actually euthanize intellectually disabled children. That means kill them.
Speaker 1: It's an idea that's actually proposed in the American Journal
Speaker 1: of Psychiatry by a neurologist named Robert Foster Kennedy July.
Speaker 1: Kennedy argues that death is sometimes the most appropriate prescription
Speaker 1: for children he called nature's mistakes. This defective child has
Speaker 1: no future nor hope of one, then it is a
Speaker 1: merciful and kindly thing to relieve that defective often tortured
Speaker 1: and convulse, gro task and observed useless and fullish and
Speaker 1: entirely undesirable of the agony of living. Basically execute them.
Speaker 1: Shocking right, not to everybody. Back then the previous year,
Speaker 1: in a poll of thousands of doctors in New York,
Speaker 1: of the respondents said they favored legalizing euthanasia for severely
Speaker 1: disabled kids. And back in ninety three, this was the
Speaker 1: world that Donald T was born into. When we returned
Speaker 1: Mary and Beamon triplet wrestle with the scientific communities insistence
Speaker 1: that the best course of action is locking their baby
Speaker 1: boy away forever. H grandfather mccravy j R. McCravey was
Speaker 1: born in Titan County, Mississippi, in eighteen sixty six, and
Speaker 1: he grew up on a farm in really abject power,
Speaker 1: but had a mind for banking. That's Donald Triplet's brother Oliver.
Speaker 1: Their family founded and are still part owners of the
Speaker 1: Bank of Forest. Their mother, Mary had a college degree,
Speaker 1: which was very rare for a woman in the middle
Speaker 1: of Mississippi in that time. She married the former mayor's son,
Speaker 1: Oliver Beamon Triplet Jr. Known to most people as Mr Beamon.
Speaker 1: Beamon had a degree from Yale Law School, also rare
Speaker 1: for the middle of Mississippi, and he practiced law and Forest.
Speaker 1: My father was interested in law early on, and when
Speaker 1: he graduated from il SAPs in the early twenties, the
Speaker 1: state had lost its accreditation and he had a cousin
Speaker 1: that lived in Valdosta, Georgia that had connections with the
Speaker 1: University of Florida. He got him and rolled down there
Speaker 1: in the law school and he went for two years,
Speaker 1: but decided he wanted a more prestigious law degree and
Speaker 1: opted to go to Yale, and so he went to
Speaker 1: New Haven as a one year wonder and he told me, said,
Speaker 1: the professor's up there. You know. Su A resented the
Speaker 1: fact I was going up there, but he said I
Speaker 1: was very diligent and graduated with honors. So as as
Speaker 1: how at all came down. In three, Mary gave birth
Speaker 1: to Donald. When Donald was three, his parents brought him
Speaker 1: to Sanatorium, Mississippi, to a facility known as the preventorium.
Speaker 1: But he wouldn't be making the return trip. Now that's
Speaker 1: kind of a strange word, preventorium, but there actually used
Speaker 1: to be a lot of them around the country. Children,
Speaker 1: especially poor children, were thought to be at high risk
Speaker 1: of tuberculosis, and doctors would send kids away to these
Speaker 1: places called preventoriums to keep them safe by keeping them
Speaker 1: out of society where the germs were. But Donald wasn't
Speaker 1: really at risk of catching TV. That's not why he
Speaker 1: was sent away. It was because he was different. And
Speaker 1: this was a thing that sometimes wealthy families dead. It
Speaker 1: was a way to institutionalize a child without having to
Speaker 1: connect it to any sort of mental condition. It was
Speaker 1: a way to dodge the stigma. And perhaps for that reason,
Speaker 1: or perhaps they just didn't know what else to do.
Speaker 1: That's what Donald's parents did in seven, and we wondered
Speaker 1: what would the separation have been like for Donald's parents
Speaker 1: to go through. Oh I, it was extremely difficult, John,
Speaker 1: you could imagine, I mean this, this was her firstborn child.
Speaker 1: Here's another member of the Triplet family. My name is
Speaker 1: Obe Triplet, and Don is my uncle. Maman Triplet was
Speaker 1: Don's father, and my granddad. He was a lawyer here
Speaker 1: in town and settled here and wound up Mary and
Speaker 1: my grandmother, her name was Mary mccrayev and Don was
Speaker 1: born and everything's good, and then things started, you know, changing.
Speaker 1: She realized that something wouldn't quite right. There's the way
Speaker 1: you know, a picture of this. Of course, the at
Speaker 1: the time, autism wasn't even a word that I'm aware of.
Speaker 1: I'm not an expert or anything, but nobody knew, you know,
Speaker 1: about it or anything. He was under the impression that
Speaker 1: perhaps he was insane. Donald was not insane, but the
Speaker 1: state of psychiatry was stunning lee primitive back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties, especially child psychiatry. That's another topic we'll be
Speaker 1: delving into more deeply in our next episode. There was
Speaker 1: no one in the professional ranks who could make sense
Speaker 1: of Donald's behaviors. I asked Donald's brother Oliver, what he
Speaker 1: thought the early signs were that his mom had noticed
Speaker 1: I was ready before my time, So I told you
Speaker 1: My earliest memory of him wasn't forty three, but from
Speaker 1: what I'm told in a secure hearsay, he he was
Speaker 1: unrest positive. He didn't like to cook stuff like that.
Speaker 1: That's nothing but hearsay. I went a round for that.
Speaker 1: Donald never ran to his father when he came home
Speaker 1: from work. He never pried for his mother. They often
Speaker 1: felt he was looking right through them. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, he had this attachment to objects. He especially
Speaker 1: love to spin things, but if he was interrupted while
Speaker 1: doing that or anything else, he would have intense tantrums.
Speaker 1: It became clear that Donald was protecting something really important
Speaker 1: to him, and that was sameness, pure, unadulterated predictability. The
Speaker 1: triplets through everything they had at trying to find an
Speaker 1: answer for their son. They had money, they had access
Speaker 1: to the best technological tools of the day, a car
Speaker 1: and a telephone. They got Donald seen by top docters,
Speaker 1: but nobody had an explanation for Donald's differences. And along
Speaker 1: the way we're guessing. His parents heard some terms that
Speaker 1: were extremely painful to hear. Defective, demented, deranged, feeble minded.
Speaker 1: And when kids got these kinds of labels, there were
Speaker 1: so often the really depressing prescription for what should be done.
Speaker 1: Put this child away. So when there are parents who
Speaker 1: wanted simply to keep their child at home, to make
Speaker 1: them part of their family, doctors said don't. So this
Speaker 1: is the kind of message we think Donald's parents were getting.
Speaker 1: Sending him away was not their idea, it was the doctor's.
Speaker 1: In fact, a doctor told Mary she was part of
Speaker 1: the problem. You have overstimulated him. And the doctor told
Speaker 1: them to send Donald away. That's what they were told
Speaker 1: to do. That's what that's what was expected for them
Speaker 1: to do, that's what was accepted at that time. And
Speaker 1: they went layer and got nnny. This preventatorium looked like
Speaker 1: a Greek temple with huge white columns out on the
Speaker 1: front porch. And one day Donald's parents brought him there
Speaker 1: and walked him in between the columns and they checked
Speaker 1: him in. Mary and Beamon Triplet watched the nurse take
Speaker 1: three year old Donald's hand and lead him down the hall.
Speaker 1: Then they turned away and left. I can't imagine. There
Speaker 1: was much conversation on the drive back home. Being in
Speaker 1: the preventatorium was not good for Donald. There had been
Speaker 1: a light in his eyes before he got to this place.
Speaker 1: He had been a noisy and active kid, and curious
Speaker 1: and creative. But all of that went dead at the preventorium,
Speaker 1: and almost all at once. We found a photograph of
Speaker 1: Donald from this period where we never expected to. It
Speaker 1: wasn't a report on the preventatorium wished in. On page
Speaker 1: thirty three, there's Donald. He's sitting on the front steps
Speaker 1: surrounded by a dozen other kids. The other kids are
Speaker 1: clearly reacting to something they're they're smiling, and they're giggling
Speaker 1: like the photographer had just made a joke to get
Speaker 1: them to laugh for the picture. But not Donald. He's
Speaker 1: just staring at the camera, not looking happy at all.
Speaker 1: And we underaged some medical notes on his time there,
Speaker 1: and they said he basically went silent. He wasn't healthy
Speaker 1: at all. The quote in the notes is that he
Speaker 1: faded away physically and he sat motionless, not paying attention
Speaker 1: to anything. All the things Donald used to like to
Speaker 1: pick up and examine and spin, like blocks and books
Speaker 1: and toy trucks, and pots and pans. He stopped reaching
Speaker 1: for them or for anything. The examining doctor later concluded,
Speaker 1: it seems that he had his worst phase. Donald's mom
Speaker 1: and dad really missed their son, and they were not
Speaker 1: giving up on helping him. Somehow. One day Beamon sat
Speaker 1: down with his secretary, Katherine Robertson, and he started to
Speaker 1: dictate a letter, which she typed up pages and pages
Speaker 1: of its single space thirty three pages long of observations
Speaker 1: of Donald's behaviors. In time, the words Beamon spoke and
Speaker 1: that Ms. Robertson typed up would travel far and wide.
Speaker 1: They would be quoted in scholarly research, discussed in university classrooms,
Speaker 1: translated into multiple languages, words that still paint a vivid
Speaker 1: portrait and helped to define the diagnosis that we call autism.
Speaker 1: Simply put this letter, this cry for help. It opened
Speaker 1: a door to a new way of understanding. Coming up
Speaker 1: on Autism's first child, older Donald T. Sive years old,
Speaker 1: Din was victim I cleaned from Forest, Mississippi, and made
Speaker 1: me aware for the first time of the behavior pattern
Speaker 1: noth neon to meet or anyone else debt to four.
Speaker 1: Even though I was diagnosed at the age of eleven,
Speaker 1: where autism didn't really mean anything at that point. Um,
Speaker 1: I only knew that I was different and the different
Speaker 1: was bad. You're cruel. Kids can be particularly young, right.
Speaker 1: You don't keep secrets in small pounds, you know. I
Speaker 1: think the combination of the bank of the respect that
Speaker 1: his family had earned went a long way towards the
Speaker 1: community realizing that here's this family with a great deal
Speaker 1: of stature in the community who have a son that's
Speaker 1: causing them a great deal of struggle. I think something
Speaker 1: to be considered about Donald Triplet is that he's in
Speaker 1: a homachiness space, which means that the family had means
Speaker 1: and access and power. The framework for doing that. Some
Speaker 1: diagnostic test itself is based on how white people understand
Speaker 1: behavior and language. I'm John don Vent. I'm Karen Zucker.
Speaker 1: Autism's First Child is a production of School of Humans
Speaker 1: and I Heart Podcasts and based on our book and
Speaker 1: documentary film in a Different Key. The podcast is produced
Speaker 1: by Alexander Ritchie. Our story editors are Matt Riddle and
Speaker 1: Alex French, senior staff writer at I Heart Originals. Original
Speaker 1: score composed and mixed by Alice McCoy. Scoring mixing and
Speaker 1: mastering by Ryan Peoples. Voiceovers by Zoe Wert, Michael Coscarelli,
Speaker 1: David Perry, Christopher Paul Stelling, and Louis Carloso. The Rainman
Speaker 1: clip courtesy of MGM Media Licensing Archival sound thanks to
Speaker 1: Craig Smith at freesound dot org. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott,
Speaker 1: Brandon Barr, Elsie Crowley and Jason English. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: Ray Conley, Ernie Intra Doot and Will Pearson School of
Speaker 1: Humans