By the 1860s, medical science was taking a harder look at people with signs of mental retardation. Dr. J. Langdon Down, an English physician, first systematically described in 1866 the condition known today as Down syndrome (formerly and unfortunately known as mongolism), the most common type of mental retardation.
The twentieth century brought further understanding. Dr. Maria Montessori, Italy’s first female physician, began a demonstration program in 1900 with twenty-two children who were believed to be incapable of learning. Adapting Itard and Sequin’s sensory teaching materials, Dr. Montessori showed that these “deficients,” as they were called, could indeed learn. In fact, they could pass exams on a level with normal children. Based on that experience, Dr. Montessori opened a school for normal children in the slums of Rome in 1907 and subsequently established schools around the world for children of all abilities.
In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Western society also toyed with social Darwinism — the theory that the most fit should not only survive but lead. If groups or nations were to become stronger by promoting the most talented individuals, what place could be left for the weaker members of society, like the mentally retarded? Only recently it has come to light in Britain that Winston Churchill used social Darwinism to suggest that the “mentally degenerate” should be forcibly sterilized. As British Home Secretary in 1910–1911, Churchill proposed that this solution would be more humane than concentrating them in institutions. In other words, prevent the degenerates from reproducing and the British empire could eliminate its feebleminded population. Churchill’s idea never took hold in Great Britain, but it ironically foreshadowed actions of his nation’s enemy, Adolf Hitler.
Meanwhile, the pioneering discoveries of Itard, Seguin, Froebel, Montessori, and a few physicians like Down would languish for decades before being applied to a broad population of children and adults with mental retardation. In the first half of the twentieth century, most were isolated at home, cared for as best a family could, treated as perpetual children and rarely challenged educationally, vocationally, or socially. Or they were sent to large institutions where they were warehoused, often with patients who were mentally ill or criminally insane. Institutions established early in this century carried pejorative names like “institutions for the feeble-minded.”
Into this world climate, Caroline Grace Buck was born on March 4, 1920. She would be known within the family as Carol, but she would be a secret from the world for thirty years. Even then, her mother would refer to Carol in her writing as “the child” or “my child,” never by name.
Carol was Pearl and John Lossing Buck’s first child, born in China where he taught agricultural science and she taught English under the auspices of an American Missionary board. At seven pounds, eight ounces, Carol was a healthy baby with “…lots of dark hair, pretty and very alert…so alert, looking around,” wrote a family friend at the time. During the first three years of Carol’s life, Pearl Buck had no hint of a problem.
In August of 1921, as Pearl Buck was mothering seventeen-month-old Carol in China, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was taking a dip in the frigid Bay of Fundy, on the other side of the globe. He soon fell ill with a chill and fever. Within a few days he could not walk or move his legs. After three years of agonizing effort, FDR’s struggle with paralysis culminated at the 1924 Democratic National Convention. In his first public appearance since being stricken by polio, FDR walked erect to the podium. Wearing heavy steel braces and supported on one side by a crutch and on the other by his son’s arm, FDR reached the podium to thunderous cheers. After a speech nominating Al Smith, FDR was cheered for an hour and thirteen minutes.
Whether Pearl Buck learned of FDR’s triumph at the time, through newspaper accounts or letters from friends in America, is merely speculative. But FDR’s example of confronting a handicap directly, and in public, would have an eventual impact on her.
Back in China…Carol was physically strong and vigorous and showed remarkable musical ability. But as she played and smiled through her first five or six years, it gradually became apparent that her mental development was slower than other children’s. After frustrating consultations with doctors in China, Pearl brought Carol to the United States for evaluation. The American doctors’ diagnosis was severe mental retardation.
Whenever parents are told that their child has a developmental disability, they wonder why and what—Why my child? Why our family? What caused it? What could I have done to prevent it? In The Child Who Never Grew, Ms. Buck wrote eloquently of these wrenching questions. But in the 1920s and for two more decades, she could take no consolation from a clear reason for Carol’s retardation, for there was no explanation. All a doctor could tell her at the time was “I don’t know. Somewhere along the way, before birth or after, growth stopped.”
Without any explanation or treatment for Carol, Pearl Buck struggled to accept her daughter’s condition. As the child of missionaries, Pearl Buck spent most of life in China, steeped in Chinese language and culture. From the Chinese she absorbed two important attitudes: “love of children for their own sakes and beyond” and acceptance of “any human infirmity for what it is,” she later wrote. Growing up in China, Ms. Buck saw blind, lame, deformed people coming and going in their communities. No shame, no blame. They were openly “accepted for themselves” because the Chinese believed that any affliction was part of one’s fate, ordained by heaven, to be respected as such, and therefore not the fault of the individual or the family.
While this side of Chinese philosophy helped her somewhat to accept Carol’s limitations, Pearl Buck fought another Chinese custom: the practice of abandoning female babies. A year before Carol’s birth, she had written home about “how much infanticide goes on this city. It is very prevalent over all China.…”
By the late 1920s, China was torn by political turmoil — a dangerous and frightening fact which complicated the Bucks’ dilemma about Carol and her future. How would they raise this child whose mind seemed to stop growing? What would happen to her if anything happened to them? Who would care for Carol? After much agonizing and searching, Ms. Buck decided to place Carol at age nine in a residential institution, the Training School at Vineland, New Jersey.
While Carol remained safely at Vineland, the world rolled along. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hitler sent mentally retarded people off to camps and ovens. In the same decades, Pearl Buck became a world renowned author. Her most widely read book, The Good Earth, is the story of Wang Lung, a peasant who founded a powerful dynasty. The vast majority of readers never suspected that Wang Lung’s sorrow “that his eldest girl child neither spoke nor did those things which were right for her age.…” was drawn from the author’s life.
With the huge success of The Good Earth, the public wanted to know more about Pearl Buck — just who was this American woman living in China? At her publisher’s request, she penned a brief biographical sketch, “but I could not mention Carol,” she wrote to her closest friend, Emma Edmunds White. And she asked Ms. White not to discuss Carol publicly: “It is not shame at all but something private and sacred, as sorrow must be. I am sore to the touch there and I cannot endure even the touch of sympathy. Silence is best and far the easiest for me. I suppose this is because I am not resigned and never can be. I endure it because I must, but I am not resigned. So make no mention of her and so spare me.”