Poor Farm Pathways, Part Two

Presenting: Poor Farm Pathways

Content: insanity diagnosis; eugenics; Bedlam; Snake Pit; “wellness farms,” animal confinement

• Main Voice(s): Emerson Cram 
• Special Guests: 
  • Julie Watkins, Events Manager, Johnson County Historic Poor Farm
  • Dr. Jenell Johnson, Professor of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison 
  • Dr. Aimi Hamraie, Canada Research Chair in Technology, Society, and Disability, York University 
  • Hallie Ableman, PhD Candidate in American Studies, University of Iowa  

Highlights
Conversations with disability studies scholars, whose work intersects with poor farm themes: medical diagnosis, what design practices tell us about bodies and the built environment, and unexpected connections between disability and animals. Join Emerson to hear about film & cultural memory, how societal ideas about work shaped psychiatric environments, and the potentially surprising narrative of rural vice. The social history of poor farms meets up with a 2024 U.S. Presidential candidate through the idea of “wellness farms.”   

Conclusion
What do we really know about rural histories? Fear of vice and difference in 20th century rural histories have much to teach about the surprising forces behind meanings of “disability.” 

Transcript
For a full transcript of this episode, visit: disabilityecologiespodcast.buzzsprout.com

Credits
Episode written and narrated by Emerson Cram, University of Iowa. Recorded with Riverside FM. Production and sound editing by Emerson Cram. 

All media clips are used for educational purposes only.

Von Gogan—Trailers. “Bedlam-Horror-1946-clip.”  

Seeker Rising, “The Snake Pit ‘insane to sane.’” 

Kiera Butler, “RFK Jr. Wants to Send People Addicted to Antidepressants to Government ‘Wellness Farms,’” Mother Jones 24 July 2024. 

“We Would Like to Drink,” from the Harry Oster Folk Music Collection, Rita Benton Music Library, UI Libraries. Thanks to Katie Buehner and Christine Burke.

Typing 5 lines.wav by soundslikewillem -- https://freesound.org/s/193971/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0

Funding
Research, writing, and production have benefitted from generous support from multiple sources, including: the National Communication Association’s Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award; UI OVPR Arts and Humanities Initiative Standard Grant; UI Provost Investment in Strategic Priorities; UI College of Liberal Arts DSHB Humanities Scholar; CLAS Summer Humanities Award.

Special Thanks
With thanks to Maura De Cicco; UIowa Departments of Communication Studies, Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, and American Studies (Especially Angie Looney, Kembrew McLeod, Eric Vázquez, Naomi Greyser, & Hallie Abelman); Julie Watkins; State Historical Society of Iowa (especially Hang Nguyen, Allison Johnson, and Anu Tiwari); Sarah Keen; V Fixmer-Oraiz; Rebecca Dewing; 2024 Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities Seminar; Claire Fox; Teresa Mangum; Jennifer New; Phaedra C. Pezzullo; Constance Gordon; and Jesse Waggoner. 

Audience Participation

• Call to Action: Do you have a poor farm or county home story to tell? Reach out to our team to learn more about how to share! 
• Support the Show: Share this episode with friends and colleagues & stay tuned for future episodes. 
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Transcript

Transcript for Disability Ecologies Podcast Chapter Two, Part Two: Poor Farm Pathways

Emerson, 0:00:
Welcome back. You are listening to Disability Ecologies, Chapter 2, Poor Farm Pathways, Part 2.

Julie Watkins, Reading an Interpretive Sign, 0:09:
“Agnes Weeks, an 84-year-old woman from England, was admitted to the Poor Farm in July 1877 or 1879. Her occupation was listed as nursing in the 1880 census. By 1885, she was in Davenport, Iowa, in the Clarissa Cook Home for the Friendless, where she died on December 14, 1886, at the age of 90 years and 8 months. In 1885, the last year this building was used as the asylum, there were 12 “insane” people and 20 paupers, among whom were 8 idiotic and 1 insane subject for a total of 32…. Emerson sighs.” 

[a few seconds to transition]

Emerson Narrates, 1:02:
The questions I had and now hear often squarely relate to the terms themselves. What did they mean? Why were they used to bring people to the poor farm or one of the many state institutions? Why were those who were named as “paupers” and the so-called “insane” intentionally separated?

Julie Watkins, Reading an Interpretive Sign, 1:26: 
“Orange H. Douglass was declared legally insane in 1866 and 1868. Like many others, he was sent to Mount Pleasant for treatment and returned to the county poor farm to live out the rest of his life. He spent about 21 years in institutions. Leaving a wife and son, he was buried in what is now known as North Scott Cemetery.”

[a few seconds to transition]

Emerson Narrates, 1:50:
From the standpoint of the Iowa Code, “insane” was a category with broad strokes, capturing all people who were described as “idiots,” “noncompotes,” “lunatics” and “distracted persons.” But from a legal standpoint, these were not rhetorical flourishes. In the 1843 Revised Statutes of the Territory of Iowa, the very first version of the Iowa Code, that definition of “insane persons” had extraordinary power to displace autonomy. Chapter 78, for example, could void sales (like the sale or purchase of farmland); result in the appointment of a court guardian with the power to direct the sale of an insane person’s property or real estate; and otherwise assert control over that individual’s personal affairs. Each of these abilities highlight the tremendous stakes of a court determining that an individual met a legal definition of insanity. But how, in 1843, did a court “know” that someone was any of these things? 
On this, the code elaborates what—in theory—might have happened. Here’s Section 2 of Chapter 79: 

Narrator of Iowa Code, 3:20:
That if any person shall give information in writing, under his hand, to the judge of said court, that any person in their county is or has become insane, and pray that an inquiry thereof be had, such court, if satisfied that there is good cause for the exercise of his jurisdiction, shall cause the said person be brought before such court, and inquire into the facts by a jury, if the facts be doubtful. 

[a few seconds to transition]

Emerson Narrates, 3:58:
This passage gives the impression of a courtly inspection, based on the admission of community gossip. The reasons could be vast—be it out of a concern for the well-being of the individual and their capacity to manage their affairs, or out of concern for the implications to the broader community. Inspection follows after the notice and receipt of “satisfactory information” that someone having property in the county is insane; and following this, a county sheriff is directed to assemble a jury of “twelve intelligent and disinterested men.” If we follow the development over time, we also find new terms come to the surface, like in the addition of “persons of unsound mind” in 1873.
As helpful as they are to illuminate how the law constructed insanity, legal definitions can obscure how they were actually used and for what reasons. It’s also worth mentioning that courts (or even medical providers) did not share the medicalized meaning of mental illness that we tend to be more familiar with today. Meaning becomes a tricky endeavor, because we have a litany of cultural resources that encourage us to perceive particular narratives about medicine and to remember these landscapes and what they might have felt like as an experience. Think of movies like 1946’s Bedlam, or 1948’s The Snake Pit or the even more well-known novel that inspired 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This scene from Bedlam is difficult to listen to, and it also reveals some of the ways mad people (or those named as insane) have been remembered in film:

(a few seconds transition) 

Bedlam, 6:08:
“…dramatic music. GEORGE SIMS: Your riding crop, Mistress Bowen. You must hang it here. It’s a law of the institute. No weapons.” MISS BOWEN: In heaven’s name, why? SIMS: In one of his plays, Dekker…a second-rate dramatist of the last century…wrote of those in there: ‘Fierce as wild bulls, untamable as flies and these have oft from strangers’ sides snatched rapiers suddenly and done much harm.” MISS BOWEN: Strangely, here, one forgets you are a man of letters, Master Sims. SIMS: Our hospital is ancient and well known. Much written of. I dare say no man or woman comes to London from the country…who does not pay his tuppence….dramatic music and screams… Are they not witty, Mistress Bowen? And look at the frolic this one treats himself to. All day long weaving nets to catch peacocks for the royal dinner. MISS BOWEN: They’re all so lonely. They’re all in themselves and by themselves. They pay no heed to us. SIMS: You noticed that. They have their world and we have ours. MISS BOWEN: Like separate dreams. SIMS: Ours is a human world. Theirs is a bestial world. Without reason. Without soul. They’re animals. Some are dogs. These I beat. Some are pigs. Those I let wallow in their own filth. Some are tigers. These I cage. And some, like this one…are doves. MISS BOWEN: I’ve seen enough. SIMS: But you haven’t seen the other cages. MISS BOWEN: I’ve seen enough!”[1]     

[a few seconds to transition]

Emerson Narrates, 8:44:
And so, what matters about these terms at this time, and what we can’t forget, is that in the hands of the state, “insanity” was a means of legally entrenching a limited range of mental capacity as grounds for the loss of autonomy and personal liberties. Those terms become, well, sticky, over a period of time, until we take for granted what they mean and forget they came from another place or another time, and they were used to underwrite particular actions. This clip from Snake Pit, again taps into the memory of these institutions and how they translated the idea of “cure” to audiences: 

[a few seconds transition]

Snake Pit, 9:37: 
“….dramatic music. Female narrator: ‘It was strange. There I was among all those people. And at the same time, I felt as if I was looking at them from some place far away. The whole place seemed to me like a deep hole. And the people down in, like strange animals…like, snakes. And I’d been thrown in to it. Yes…as though I were in a snake pit.’ Male narrator: ‘A snake pit?’ Female narrator: ‘I remember once reading in a book that long ago they used to put insane people into pits full of snakes. I think they figured that something that might drive a normal person insane might shock an insane person back into sanity. Well, it was just as though they’d thrown me into a snake pit. And I was shocked into thinking that maybe I wasn’t as sick as the others. That I really might get well…’”[2]   

[a few seconds to transition]

Emerson Narrates, 10:38:  
Knowing a friend whose scholarship makes sense of what happens when medical and scientific knowledge creep into media, I thought it would be a good idea to chat her up. This is Jenell Johnson, a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a long-time scholar of rhetoric and disability studies. Part of our conversation turned toward how we were making sense of historical diagnoses. 

Emerson, 11:09:
“From a memory perspective, because cultural narratives and media have a powerful role shaping meaning around psychiatry and institutionalization, and various forms of therapeutics. Do you have any insight about the kinds of cultural contexts that…where these narratives…so I’m thinking about in the past 5-7 years or so when Ratchet came out, for example, on Netflix, which is a recycling of a main character. When these narratives come up, how they allow us negotiate meaning about a cultural crisis or an issue in our culture more broadly?”    

Jenell Johnson, 12:05:
“I think that with regard to memory, when you think about some of these procedures, I mean, I think this, and this is one of the things I write about in my book, is that if we’re talking about something like Ratchet, the way that is basically running on a shared cultural memory of this moment in time, right? And so, you know, this idea of the way that a procedure like lobotomy or just psychiatry more generally, or it’s things like institutionalization, you know. I mean, we can think about that as a kind of technology, you know, the state in that case. But each one of these things takes shape at a particular moment in time, but these things get carried forward, you know, they kind of haunt the present in these kinds of ways. One of my very favorite ways of thinking about memory is through Sarah Ahmed's book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, and she talks about the role of stickiness, the way that certain narratives get stuck to each other. And that's always the way that I think about some of these issues is that psychiatry gets stuck to dissent, for example, gets stuck to gender politics, you know, gets stuck to um racial politics, the way that you know Jonathan Metzel talks about in his book about schizophrenia. And all of these things they accumulate over years, you know, and so I think that the accumulation of some of those meanings, in part, they carry forward not just beneficial things, but also deeply harmful ones, right? And so a lot of those meanings I think in any historical work, I think that immediately what comes to mind is something like deep contextualization. So there are these terms, and I'm thinking particularly there are terms that are associated with mental and intellectual disability that have become especially sticky. And so anytime you're looking at, for example, an institution, oftentimes the literal names of the institutions have themselves these stigmatizing terms. So one of the places I write about in the book, one of the original names that it had was lunatic asylum. So that particular term which is hugely stigmatizing, and you can think of other ones particularly terms that I think are associated with eugenics practices circulated a little bit more, and I think have found their way into our common parlance in ways that I think other medical terms. And it's one of those things that I've always found really fascinating, but there's a way in which I think sometimes those medical terminologies, they move into State discourses, and then that's one of the ways in which they end up becoming normalized…”

[a few seconds to transition]

Emerson Narrates, 14:55:
It’s not simply film, either, and these stories can change depending on the time period, and what emerging situations might call for certain kinds of memories to come to the fore. For all of the examples I could list from film, there are memoirs or quasi-autobiographies written from the perspective of those subject to the culture of institutional life, or overt medicalization. Those perspectives have been powerful testimony to contest diagnostic criteria now seen as retrograde, because it relied on gender or race-based stereotypes as medical knowledge.

Take for instance, the discrediting of intelligence testing, formally developed for the first time in early 20th century France, but preceded by hundreds of years of debates over mental capacity. Those prior instances coupled an obsession for limiting the qualifiers of personhood with racial thinking. The idea of intelligence—which was used to make arguments about cognitive or psychiatric disabilities—was partly a consequence of creating the idea of race and racial classification.[3] Some scales for intelligence testing—like the Stanford-Binet test—were used in Iowa as grounds for institutionalization, the surrender of children into the foster care system, and even eugenic sterilization.

You can imagine the gulf between these two vantage points: on one hand, a medical specialty rooted in asylum care, but with a desire to establish legitimacy in medicine more broadly; and on the other hand, the perspective of someone who—through the power of diagnosis—has been displaced as a faithful narrator of their own reality. In the chasm of disputed realities, how are we to make meaning of the “authority” of an institutional experience? And, of course, the spaces of the asylum or the poor farm does not represent in total the spaces attached to stories of negative dependency, or policing of need, or the desire for curative measures. But much of our current system exists only because of these earlier forms. Those are stories to tell another day.

But… all of it—it’s all a story that keeps mattering into this moment… In July 2024, then U.S. Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke at a “Latino Town Hall” podcast recording and unveiled his plan for intervention in addiction and recovery plans. The event caught the ears of multiple news outlets…   

[transition]

RFK Jr. Town Hall, 18:19:
“I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also legal drugs, and other psychiatric drugs, if they want to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall. And to spend time, as much time as they need, three or four years if they need it, to learn to get reparented. I’m going to move [cannabis] off Schedule 1, and I’m going to start collecting taxes on it. That’s going to bring in $8.5 billion in revenue. I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms—in rural areas all over this country. They’re going to grow their own food—organic food, high quality food—because a lot of the behavioral issues are food related. A lot of the illnesses are food related. There won’t be any cell phones there, there won’t be any screens. We’re going to reparent people, restore this connection to community.”[4]
 
[few seconds transition]

Emerson Narrates, 19:20:
It’s not lost on me that immediately after news outlets circulated the story, many a friend and colleague reached out, even the cashier I chat with at my local grocery store said to me: “hey, isn’t this related to that research project you told me about?” And I would chuckle, and then ask, “oh, tell me more about what you’re thinking!” The connections people made between the poor farm history and RFK’s pseudo proposal attributed to the power of stories—to draw connections between then and now. There were the ideas about work as therapeutic, and the fantasy of rehabilitation in order to become an independent worker. Even at the core of it was that old story of pathology. I think for many of my friends, and myself, we felt a particular unease with a consistent fixation on SSRIs and ADHD medications, or on narratives that simplified the relationship between food consumption and what he consistently refers to as an epidemic of escalating “chronic disease.” 

Largely prescribed for conditions like chronic depression, anxiety, in addition to ADHD, these medications from Kennedy’s view, were overtly easy access and enculturating pharmaceutical dependency. In reality, access to a diagnosis is absolutely fraught and difficult, because the diagnostic criteria can be incredibly gendered, racialized and classed. And that’s all before reconciling with medication shortages, shifting federal or state regulations in what prescribers can do telehealth, in addition to the reality of controlled substances and the combination of these things on real access. And more, his call for the federal government to “reparent” is a crucial contradiction worth noticing. Following his implicit assumptions, it tracks that if one if wrongly dependent (in this case on psychiatric drugs), a parent would be reestablish—independence? Not sure how…and then, there’s the thing where the Republican Party platform has marshalled every resource possible to denigrate the social safety net, under the auspices of not enabling government as parental. At least, one in which the welfare state is imagined as “the mommy state.” I also won’t deny that the contemporary food system contributes to chronic illness of various kinds—in later chapters, you’ll hear more about how people are talking about the cancer and food system nexus. Cancer is a chronic illness. The food system is a disability issue, not only for reasons of access. But disability and food justice advocates map interventions in a way that departs in crucial ways by comparison to RFK Jr’s.

Diagnosis is, as it turns out, really complicated, no matter if we turn historically or to the present. But we should really take a moment to consider what parallels we are living through. Here again, is Dr. Jenell Johnson, speaking to the power and politics of diagnosis:   

Jenell Johnson, 23:33: 
So the first thing that comes to mind is just a reminder that the process of diagnosis as a rhetorical process is incredibly, deeply situational and contextual. I think that diagnosis is one of those examples where it's impossible to understand the history of psychiatry without understanding how diagnosis has really moved and shaped depending on a lot of social norms and values about what bodies and minds should be like. And so when I think about the process of diagnosis as it's moving, one of them, I think the main way would be the establishment of something like stigma. So something like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, these kinds of illnesses are not inherently stigmatized. So the way that stigma for some of those procedures comes has to do with people's understanding of them that, again, circulates through a lot of these cultural channels.

[a few seconds transition]

Emerson Narrates 24:37: 
Before continuing, humility requires I note that in this abbreviated story, it is impossible to do justice to the complexity of psychiatry and its evolving relationship to poor farm pathways. As I mentioned, in the progressive era of the U.S., psychiatry was one of a few domains constructing a monopoly on who could be recognized as an authority of negative dependency. Those others included the legal sphere, the social sciences (but especially sociology), and the developing field of social work. 

The reason why psychiatry is so wedded to this era is because of their early association in the U.S. with state asylums. In contrast to narratives of spaces like “Bedlam,” the early era of asylum building in the U.S. prioritized the voices of people like Thomas Kirkbride. He was a Quaker, a psychiatrist, and the designer of what became known as “The Kirkbride Plan,” which systematized principles from the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane.”[5] Kirkbride combined modern values of efficiency in addition to the management of labor and land, in order to bring his take on the moral treatment to life. These castle-like spaces contrast to the otherwise crude quarters that comprise the historic asylum. But even as their contrast makes evident the difference in state and county resources, the county farm and the state hospital are alike in their embrace of “work” as a potential therapeutic end. This belief fundamentally shapes the design of the built environment.

To talk about design and disability, I contacted Dr. Aimi Hamraie, who is currently a Canada Research Chair in Technology, Society, and Disability at York University. Dr. Hamraie is an internationally known scholar and leader of the Critical Design Lab… 

[brief transition]

Aimi Hamraie 27:08: 
So my research focuses on the ways that disabled people have redesigned the built and technological environments since the 20th century.

[brief transition]

Emerson Narrates, 27:22: 
I asked Aimi what—or who, rather—were the major influences on design thinking in the 19th and 20th century. 

Aimi Hamraie, 27:33:
Oh, there's so many. I could probably write a whole encyclopedia about that. So I can say the ones that are important for me. I think that the concept of scientific management that comes from Fred Winslow Taylor [inaudible 00:22:28] picked up on some very eugenic practices of designing for users and set us up to say that there should be a standard form of design. So what they did, was to say there's one best way to do factory work. Human beings are just like these wild cards. We need to standardize their movements, otherwise we're never going to have productivity. And the things that they did as a result of that, including with disabled people, they worked a lot with disabled people, that created the ideology of disability as embodiment, to be productive from the 19th to 20th century. That was pretty prevalent…. I would also say Henry Dreyfuss, who was an American industrial designer who took data from the military and produced design standards, and also all of these drawings, working with Alvin (R. Tilley) to create these drawings of the average man and woman. That was really one of the only sources of information about the human body, for a lot of designers, of the sorts of things we use in everyday life, like chairs and pens and spoons and all that kind of stuff, came from Henry. And so the model that he was setting, was really profoundly influential, and did adapt in certain ways later, to incorporate some very limited disability data that, again, contributing to standardization. If you ask this question of an architect, they’d need to talk about modernism, but I think that one of the big picture things that we see as a sort of technocratic approach to design that cuts across this whole period of time, and ways that knowledge about bodies gets integrated in design, people don't often talk about it very directly, but just the undercurrent, you could say…(fade out).

[a few seconds transition]

Emerson Narrates, 30:18:
But for design to be useable—meaning, an interface between a person and the built environment—designers need to develop a theory of the “user.” In the asylum building period of the late 19th century, the culture of the United States does not really use the vocabulary of “normal” to describe bodies and minds, per se. We do have terms like “insane,” or “pauper” or “degenerate.” These terms became meaningful to a wide array of audiences through the building of asylums, poor houses, and other forms of institutionalized care. In turn, these ideas shaped how the public would perceive the so-called “problem” of negative dependency—that term that imagines and treats people as if they are burdens or waste for the broader public. In part, that problem was rendered meaningful through the ideas of perceived human difference rooted in the veneer of scientific thought. In short, this approach to human difference imagined the concept of race as a naturalized form. Dominant science of the time period would later be named “scientific racism,” and denounced in the 1950s as human hierarchy masquerading as a narrative of “truth.” Here again, is Dr. Hamraie, speaking about why we need to think more carefully about the construct of the “user” in design during this period. 

Aimi Hamraie, 32:11: 
So the user tends to be kind of a very generic figure for designers, a lot of the time. And there are certain texts that I engage with that represent the body of the user architectural handbooks [inaudible 00:36:53] work, where often it's just sort of a universal male standard figure, and then some sort of woman's body that's added. Sometimes it's just a shoe, sometimes it's a whole body. But there are also figures of the user and visual representations of the user.

[a few seconds to transition]

Emerson Narrates, 32:49:
We talked about a range of examples from the 20th century, but I was also curious what kinds of users were imagined in the asylum building era… 

Emerson, 33:03:
“And then most of the examples that you work with are grounded in 20th century examples. I’m curious if the notion of imagined users in your research extend to 19th century users as well. So, as some context, part of the poor farm history that I’m tracing is rooted in the emergence and expansion of mental health institutions in Iowa and the Midwest more broadly, at the mid 19th century and onward. And so I’m thinking about the various arguments of Kirkbride design, things like that. Does the notion of imagined users extend into the 19th century?” 

Aimi Hamraie, 33:54: 
Yeah, it definitely does. So in my book, the chapter, the history of the user, starts in the 19th century because the figure of the user emerges in that time, in scientific management and in relation to what was called the human factor. So that was more of in an industrial context, but I think that asylum hospitals, those kinds of spaces are designed in accordance to scientific management principles as well. But a lot of it is this kind of biopolitical control of bodies that are outside of the norm, actually. And so even just the concept of the user, the valence of it, was that it was this unstable, unknowable type of person that we had to standardize as much as possible. And I think that, that's also how mad people get treated in asylum, and disabled people get treated in hospitals.” 

[a few seconds to transition]

Emerson Narrates, 35:10:
So, what does this all mean? Design is a multi-faceted language, that allows us to make sense of how a body or mind corresponds to its built environment. But design also provides a language for far-reaching connections. I am curious how revolutions in the built environment can tell us about design more broadly. What does design tell us about social or cultural commitments? Or of the ways that human imagination—for better and worse—shapes the design of our lives, cities, and communities. 

[audio underlay of music with mysterious percussive tone, with triangle bell sounds]

In retrospect all these years later, how do we name the impact of these earlier social designs—their creation of names, perspectives, and problems in search of solutions, or, the inverse, of solutions in search of problems. In the asylum building era, which overlaps with the building and operation of the historic poor farm, pathways are a kind of blueprint for naming “social problems.” Those patterns resurface over time in new, but not so new circumstances.   

So, in addition to pathways rendered through the now curated asylum building, there’s an additional story that I’ve been tracking. When you go to libraries to learn more about the past—from the vantage point of an individual or an organization—you develop a relation to pattern recognition. This means establishing connections across a massive volume of material—where you find webs of meaning and practice that could otherwise be treated as individual documents or names or data flattened to exist outside of social relationships.
You might remember my reference to John L. Gillin. At first, he was just a name of some guy, listed in the bibliography of the historic resources report, for his book A History of Poor Relief Legislation in Iowa, which documents the evolution of poverty relief from Ohio, Wisconsin, and its impact on the development of legislation in Iowa. But as I started to dive into different collections at the State Historical Society in Iowa City, I started to find references to his name listed with a regularity that made me rethink what role he played in this whole story. That is a much longer story for another day. 

The point that I want to make here, however, is that I allowed my intuition to drive my inquiry, into University Archives of my home institution in addition to making a month-long commitment to read his entire collection at the University of Wisconsin. My intuition wasn’t simply about the patterns. It was about my own lived history, which brought me into an academic environment that enabled me to learn from others who turned their attention to rural histories of gender and sexuality. These histories reveal important stories in unexpected places—like agricultural research stations, the development of 4-H, or rural social welfare.[6]

As I move forward with my curiosity into the depth of Gillin’s own professional and intellectual world, I keep coming back to some of his central questions. What is a social problem? How should they be understood, quantified and remedied? Gillin’s 1928 textbook titled—wait for it—Social Problems, illuminates his thinking, lectures, and writings on the topic.[7] Gillin was not alone in his thinking, as many of the sociologists of his generation vied to make sense of what they perceived as the catastrophe of social stagnation in the midst of ongoing revolutions in industry, labor, and social institutions. Gillin became particularly invested in the social institution of the family, which he argued was “fundamental.” Any perceived threat to the family unit was treated as a moral crisis. Because Gillin started his career at the same institution where I now work, between the years of 1907-1912, I was able to find some of his remnants of his impact otherwise preserved in local libraries. My own homework moving forward is to dig even deeper so I can develop these connections, so I can best make sense of these actions and words. There are two remnants I want to share with you. 

[underlying audio of typewriter typing]

The first, is a letter to the University President, John G. Bowman:  

John L. Gillin, 41:08:
January 15, 1912. President John G. Bowman. Dear Sir: Referring to the subject of our conversation last week with reference to fellowships for research work in social conditions in Iowa I wish to urge the provision of four fellowships of $500 each for that purpose… The work of these fellows would be to investigate under competent direction social conditions in selected towns and rural communities throughout the state. These communities would be such as after preliminary investigation would seem to be typical of the various aspects of society and likely to furnish as it were a cross section of the social life of the entire state. It has seemed to me in view of the findings of the Chicago and Minneapolis Vice Commissions that there is considerable likelihood of such an investigation showing that the small town and the rural community have “the social evil,” for example, quite as much as the large city. It is my belief, however, that a different phase of this evil would be found there. I believe that it would be desirable to institute an inquiry whether here in this great agricultural state there are not social conditions which are vitally connected with that problem of our cities. Incidentally much light would probably be thrown upon many more of our social problems, for few problems exist in isolation. These fellowships should I think for the best results be provided for two years so that a thorough investigation could be made of the places selected. Later if the inquiry proved fruitful a more far-reaching study might be thought desirable. ….Very truly yours, John Gillin.[8]

Emerson Narrates, 43:14:
While community surveys were typical for sociologists of the times—the progressive era—in addition to the nascent development of the field of social work, and public charity workers, Gillin makes a specific reference that immediately caught my attention. In his appeal to President Bowman, Gillin draws from the findings of two recent vice commissions in major midwestern cities.

The extent that these commissions influenced actions in the state of Iowa, is something that I have yet to track down, but scholar Leslie J. Harris of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee notes the Chicago commission greatly influenced the commissions of other cities. In her analysis, Harris shows how fears over “vice” and “disease” spilled over the porous boundaries of the vice district to emanate as an uncontained threat of social evil.[9] In rural areas to the hinterland of Chicago and other major cities, young adults or adolescents might have read of the enticing reasons to leave farm life for the city.[10] They might have also felt the pull, from parents or community leaders, among others, who warned against the allure of a life in the city, for its corrupting influences. These arguments of the time were not inherently meaningful, or even accurate in terms of phenomena, but they can tell us a lot about the development of the moral economy that leads to tall tales of city and country, the erosion of the family form, and more. Most importantly, all of these were woven into narratives of the reasons and roots of poverty, and its affixed branches of delinquency and degenerate sexuality. All of this lore would be contested by generations to come, who sought to identify how these inflated accusations actually contributed to the stigmatization of people through an obsession of treating them as waste. These days, I hear echoes, all the more reason to dig into where those kinds of stories emerge, and how, and why.

Second, in the process of spending long hours rummaging through Gillin’s Wisconsin papers, I came across an undated document that outlined what this community survey might have entailed. I say “might” because I have yet to come across additional evidence that fills in some of the gaps between the letter, the proposal, and other likely connections. Here’s how the proposal reads: 

[underlying audio of typewriter typing]

John L. Gillin, 46:36:  
“Social Conditions in Iowa, Cities and Towns, and in Typical Rural Communities, Should Be Investigated.” “a. Application of what is known as the ‘social survey’ to the small cities and towns and the rural districts. b. Modification of the scope and methods of the survey as applied to the large city to suit the investigation of the smaller communities—somewhat simpler. c. Careful and thorough investigation of the facts about such social conditions as bear a fundamental relationship to prevention of social evils and to social betterment in selected communities.[11]   

Emerson Narrates, 47:24:
The document itself goes on, over two pages—outlining the reason why the survey needed to be done and the efficacy of doing so. And while there are community surveys of Iowa townships that were done, even some that Gillin addresses in some of his later work—it’s not yet clear to me if all of these fragments are puzzle pieces to each other, though it is very plausible they are. That’s the uncertainty that I will continue to linger with, as my sleuthing adventure continues, amidst the records that are both endless and finite. 
But I can say that my own window to the poor farm’s history, is one that finds me asking a familiar question: what do we really know about rural history, after all? Vice—or fear of it—and difference—and fear of it—were integral to rural life, no matter how many in our present times say otherwise. In other words, we might say that rural history is a bastion of moral enlightenment, but in reality, the answer is a lot more complicated. 
 
In the end, all we have are partial stories. Well, partial stories and relationships. With those, we try to make conclusions, or sometimes, turn those conclusions into possible connections, across space and time. As this chapter about poor farm pathways comes to a close, there are two conversations worth an ending. The first, about the surprising connections between disability and animals; and the second, about the lasting impressions that disability history leaves on the land itself. That thread will pick up again in the next chapter.

In Bedlam, the 1946 horror movie that sensationalized a crude asylum, you heard individuals cast as animalistic, forced to live life on the terms of someone who thought themselves a zookeeper. To better understand these connections, I chatted with Hallie Ableman. Hallie’s research encompasses questions about what animals can teach us about how we relate to or with the dynamics and multifaceted experience of disability. Once you chat with her, you will never again relate to pigs in the same way, or their representation in the form of piggie banks. In our conversation, I returned to the scene of entering the asylum for the first time and learning how after the building was found no longer suitable for people, it was converted into a hog house. Then, I asked Hallie for her gut response.

Hallie Abelman, 50:44:  
My immediate thoughts were like, okay, these are spaces where they're created so that people can keep an eye and a watch on, you know, the activities that are going on. And I know you said there are some people who don't believe these are, this was a carceral space. But it sounds similar to a jail cell, you know. And so I'm, I guess, happy that someone decided the conditions weren't good enough for people who are supposed to be, you know, quote unquote, healing or, you know, receiving care for, for whatever illnesses or whatever they were experiencing. I also, it made me think a lot about the ways these spaces can make people sick. and can induce madness. Like with pigs, for example, like I know that they are not supposed to be in these small gestation crates that they usually kept in, in factory farms. And because of that, they will often develop like something called porcine stress syndrome. And that's from being in the confined space and that unfortunately cost farmers millions and millions of dollars every year because it produces bad meat, bad pork, I guess. But it just makes me think of the ways that prisons and these spaces can also create mental illness and disease and disability. So thinking about the people who were maybe sent to the poor farm whose lives were made worse from the conditions, potentially. And one thing I think about a lot is with pigs, least, like they are, their reputation is that they keep their spaces very dirty, like the word pigsty, but in actuality, pigs are very tidy.

Emerson Narrates, 52:58: 
For all the stories I’ve heard about the rehabilitative fantasies of work, or exposure to clean air, Hallie’s comments bring me back to the reality that the small space, the cold, and the heat, the elements—all of these could be maddening. How else have we consigned people and animals as occupying similar positions on the social hierarchy? 

Hallie Abelman, 53:29:  
They use the restroom separate from where they sleep. They make their beds, they decorate their homes. They keep it very clean when they have children. So I guess I think a lot about how people are pathologized for the ways they keep their home based on what society deems like a healthy way of keeping your home, a healthy way of organizing your daily life. And just wondering if some of these people that were sent to the poor farm were people who maybe weren't able to manage keeping their home the way that society was, you know, deeming necessary at the time.

Emerson Narrates, 54:14: 
And then, at the end of our conversation, both of us wondered about the likelihood that a hypothetical resident at the later county home, who as part of their chores, tended on the pigs inside of the former asylum, if they might have developed something like a friendship with each other. As a resident doing labor, what kind of relationship did they have to the pigs inside of the barn? Did they know what the barn was used for in the past? Did that frame the way they thought about their experience at the county home, working the hours in the farm? If relationships in institutions are always formed in spite of an environment of control, it would be silly to not consider the potential bonds residents could have formed with animals they were charged to care for, and to live in such proximity to them.

Until we can find any of those traces, we’ll never know. What we do have, however, is this asylum, and the writings on the wall, that ask for us to witness a faraway world. Through that witnessing, we turn to each other, trade insights into what we know, and what we want for the future. I can only hope that these are the conversations that bring life to these walls and resuscitate the names we otherwise would never remember.  

Emerson and Julie Watkins Talking in the Asylum, 55:55:

Emerson:
I’m really interested in that name, “Home for the Friendless.”
 
Julie:
“Yeah, me too.”

Emerson:
“What would you say is the most important thing that you’ve learned through the process of working with this project?”

Julie:
“That’s a big question, laughs…The importance of preservation I’d say. And beyond just preserving history, sharing it out, teaching people about it. I went to high school a mile away from here and I was in AP US History and learned about all sorts of things, but never poor farms and how prolific they were. And, the fact that we have an example so close by… and poor farms as a concept were entirely new to me, that’s wild. That it just makes you think about what all has happened where you stand, wherever you stand, anywhere on Earth. What happened here, what is the narrative we’re told about what happened here, and what are we not being told. Or, what history is lost.

Emerson:
Yeah, it makes me think about, would we even know these names? If this building hadn’t been….had the life it had, just in terms of after the fact. And if the county had decided to do something different with this land, like turn it into a golf course.

Julie:
That was an option.

Emerson:
That was an option. Or….a new jail. At one point, that was another proposal.

Julie:
Wow.

Emerson:
But, thankfully they didn’t.

Julie:
Some people avoid it….the asylum especially. Because it’s hard to look at. But again, if we don’t face the things that we have done in the past and have the capacity of doing, how are we supposed to alter what we do in the future, or present?

[audio of sad violin melody threads under Emerson’s spoken narrative]

Emerson:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, history ultimately is about who we are and what we do and what we learn.

Julie:
If we don’t keep track of it, then….did we learn anything?

Emerson: 
That’s a good question….” 

[violin music continues for several seconds and fades]


[1] Von Gogan—Trailers. “Bedlam-Horror-1946-clip.” YouTube, uploaded 18 July 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHCpDfoZ7CI.
[2] Seeker Rising, “The Snake Pit ‘insane to sane.’” YouTube, uploaded 12 May, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCzVPnfUtFc.
[3] Martin Lund, “A Prehistory of Scientific Racism,” The MIT Press Reader, September 10, 2024, https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-prehistory-of-scientific-racism/.
[4] Kiera Butler, “RFK Jr. Wants to Send People Addicted to Antidepressants to Government ‘Wellness Farms,’ Mother Jones 24 July 2024 https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/rfk-jr-wants-to-send-people-on-antidepressants-to-government-wellness-farms/
[5] Thomas Kirkbride, On the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane with Some Remarks on Insanity and Its Treatment (Philadelphia, PA), 1854.
[6] Colin Johnson, Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America (Temple University Press), 2013; Gabriel N. Rosenberg, The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America (University of Pennsylvania Press), 2015; Ryan Lee Cartwright, Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity (University of Chicago Press), 2021.
[7] John L. Gillin, Social Problems (The Century Co.), 1928.
[8] Letter from John L. Gillin to President Bowman, John G. Bowman Papers, University Archives, University of Iowa Libraries.
[9] Leslie J. Harris, The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2023), pg. 31, 41.
[10] William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W.W. Norton, 1991), pg. 355-358.
[11] Social Conditions in Iowa, Cities and Towns, and in Typical Rural Communities, Should Be Investigated. John L. Gillin Papers, University Archives, University of Wisconsin Madison Libraries.