Lost and abandoned america
The Rosewood Center (née the Maryland Asylum and Training School for the Feeble Minded, est. 1888) is an abandoned mental hospital on the outskirts of Baltimore. The state closed its doors only in 2009 after a mountain of angry complaints involving understaffing, patient abuse, and neglect. Much of the rotting old bedlam now lies in ruins or is caked in thick soot, the aftermath of a recent suspected arson. But even in this dilapidated state, its imposing presence stirs up a sense of the foreboding.
Like many overwhelmed psychiatric facilities built around the turn of the last century, Rosewood had been dogged by shameful accusations for a long time. The most scandalous—the one that sets Rosewood apart from other asylums—was made by Leo Kanner on May 13, 1937. Before a hushed gathering at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Pittsburgh, Kanner shared the shocking tale of “the Rosewood girls.” It’s not a story most people know about today, but it’s an important reminder of just how destructive an upper class with an unchecked sense of entitlement can be, and how vital it remains to safeguard the interests of those who can’t do so for themselves. It also forces us to revisit an uncomfortable moment in our nation’s history when the practice of eugenics—human breeding for socially desirable attributes, such as intelligence—was viewed by even the most progressive human rights advocates as humane and ethical.
Kanner, a prominent Austrian-born physician who headed up the child psychiatry unit at Johns Hopkins University, was an advocate for the “feebleminded.” He’s mostly remembered today as the discoverer of autism. (For a while, autism was known as “Kanner syndrome.”) Remarkably, the cluster of symptoms that he was able to piece together from just a small sample of autistic children more than 70 years ago is still routinely used for diagnostic purposes. It was while researching the history of autism for another story, in fact, that I stumbled upon a passing reference to Kanner’s role as the main whistleblower in the Rosewood case.
It’s cliché, I realize, to describe evil as “banal.” Yet there’s no better word to describe what Kanner discovered. Evil wore tightly laced girdles under fashionable gowns. Scheming in embroidered cloche hats, it sipped tea and fingered jewels while listening to the gossip of the haut monde. It lingered especially, Kanner showed, in the affluent Baltimore suburbs of Catonsville and Forest Park, in huge, wood-paneled homes on tree-lined streets, where its heartbeat could be made out in the incessant ticking of grandfather clocks.
What was the nature of this evil? For more than 20 years, some of Baltimore’s wealthiest and most established families had been helping themselves to the institutionalized patients at Rosewood. They’d been “adopting” these mentally challenged girls and women only to turn them into their own private slaves.
It’s unclear from Kanner’s report just whose brainchild it was to steal these patients away from their cloistered lives at Rosewood, but I suspect a money-hungry wolf was at its center. The notorious Harry B. Wolf, Esq., to be precise. Wolf was a prodigious trial attorney—he racked up an average of 1,000 cases a year, nearly all of them successful—who seems to have had his hands in just about everything else in Baltimore. Real estate deals, hotel investments, even a successful ferry service company operating on the Eastern Shore. By the age of 28, he was already a former U.S. congressman. During the Great Depression, Wolf drove a Rolls Royce and lived in a sunny corner mansion in one of the area’s toniest neighborhoods.
Clues to Wolf’s involvement can be found in old court proceedings, many of which were published in the Baltimore Sun. “In Rosewood 30 Years, Woman Gains Release,” reads one early headline from 1920. “Girl Is Released by Court After 7 Years in a Home,” says another. In these newspaper accounts, Wolf is named as the attorney for long-term Rosewood patients, having personally obtained writs of habeas corpus to gain their freedom. “Attorney Wolf made a vigorous plea to the jury in the girl’s behalf, severely criticizing those responsible for her detention,” according to the account of one courtroom scene. Perhaps the clearest sign of Wolf’s central role in the sad plot is a casual statement in the same article that Wolf had 26 other similar cases lined up for trial.
If it sounds to you like Wolf was the good guy, helping some poor women escape from a lifetime of captivity at Rosewood, you’d have been putty in his hands as one of the jury members. What he was in fact doing was abusing the system for his own profit. The old judicial writ of habeas corpus (Latin for “bring the body here”) guarantees a physical hearing before a judge to weigh the legality of a person’s continued detention. If a patient at Rosewood was determined sane by the (nonexpert) judge after appearing under such a writ, she was released into society—or rather, into a custodial arrangement filed by her lawyer. In 1922 Wolf was disbarred for an obstruction of justice charge in an unrelated murder trial. But other unethical lawyers quickly mastered Wolf’s legal legerdemain, and Rosewood became a booming cottage industry for those in the know. The families of these patients weren’t told about their releases; many, of course, had dumped their unwanted relatives at the facility long before and weren’t likely to care.
Kanner found that an astonishing 166 patients left Rosewood under habeas corpus writs from 1911 to 1933, with nothing at all to indicate the oddly obliging judges’ criteria for their decisions. And when Kanner and a diligent social worker named Mabel Kraus looked into the matter further, they confirmed that these girls, women, and a few boys had not only been legally snatched from Rosewood right under everyone’s noses, but they’d been bought by the rich as unpaid laborers and indentured servants. It was a well-oiled human trafficking operation.
At first, the psychiatrists at Rosewood protested. Yet with the judges—more than likely paid off—being so accommodating to the lawyers’ requests, eventually they gave up, letting the residents leave as soon as some aggressive lawyer merely threatened to get a writ. Thus the scandal almost certainly involved more than the cases on record. Rosewood’s superintendent, Frank Keating, who died a few years prior to Kanner’s 1937 report, may have been the one to tip off Kanner about the whole affair. “In the State of Maryland,” Kanner told the conference audience in Pittsburgh, “Dr. Keating’s was a lone voice in the wilderness. Having no support from the community, he was forced to capitulate.”
Kanner, however, refused to do the same. He demanded that these injustices be stopped. “In our last so-called era of prosperity, housemaids were relatively expensive,” Kanner told the Bar Association of Baltimore City shortly before leaving for Pittsburgh. “Lawyer I and a number of ‘society matrons’ concocted a nightmarish scheme, which was to provide the matrons with cheaper help.” (“Lawyer I,” most likely Harry B. Wolf, had somehow obtained a list of patients given various light chores at Rosewood, seeing them as potential domestic workers.) “Lawyer I, his office associates and three other attorneys who soon joined the sport filed a writ for each girl without her knowledge. The girls, who had resided at the school from 5 to 30 years, had no thought of leaving. There they were well treated, had a permanent home and were not suited for extramural existence. They knew nothing about the writs until the day when, by order of the court, their ‘bodies were had’ for the hearing and they found themselves ‘released to the custody’ of women whom they did not know and who did not know them.”
Imagine if you’d lived 30 sheltered years in a mental institution, then suddenly found yourself scrubbing toilets in some lavish Edwardian estate where a socialite complained that you should be more grateful for what she’d done for you.
The shocking revelations didn’t end there. Kanner and Kraus tracked down most of the former residents of Rosewood to determine what had become of them since their releases. It wasn’t a pretty picture. The vast majority had indeed gone to reside with those “society matrons” who, under the pretense of providing them with a loving home, had in fact paid Wolf or the other unscrupulous lawyers to obtain a resident of their choosing. Most got more than they bargained for. “Many of the women soon became dissatisfied with their maids and expressed great astonishment that the girls seemed ‘stupid’ and ‘slow,’ ” Kanner told his colleagues in Pittsburgh. “This discovery, however, did not deter them from ordering another girl from Lawyer I when they got rid of the one they had.” One lady had a change of mind about a particular Rosewood girl the moment she left the courtroom, leaving her confused new charge in the parking lot. Another intended her adoptee to be a personal housemaid for just two months, kicking her out when the family left for a European vacation.
Others fell victim to abuse in these high-society homes. “A few of the women so overworked and underfed their imbecile maids,” Kanner reported, “that several of them died within two or three years after their release, mostly of acute pulmonary tuberculosis.” One woman who collected no fewer than 35 Rosewood girls had an especially mean-spirited young daughter who would spit in the maids’ faces and tip over their buckets while they did backbreaking work. Those who complained about her behavior were simply replaced by new girls. Some were sexually abused. “One girl placed in the home of a physician under his wife’s supervision was so poorly supervised,” Kanner told of another deplorable story, “that she went through nine months of an illegitimate pregnancy and gave birth to a child without anyone noticing it; the ‘supervising’ wife of the doctor … found the newborn baby in her cupboard.”
Once they proved poor housekeepers, the women were eventually tossed out on the streets. And here, things got even grimmer—the former Rosewood girls saw “a sad peregrination through the whorehouses and flophouses of the slums,” as a student of Kanner’s would write many years later. For the original 1937 report, social worker Kraus had managed to track down 102 of the 166 habeas corpus cases on record. She found that 11 women (all of whom had been in perfect health when they left Rosewood) had died of illness or neglect; 17 were plagued by infectious diseases such as syphilis, gonorrhea, or tuberculosis; 29 were prostitutes; eight had been reinstitutionalized in mental hospitals; and six were in prison for serious crimes. Overall, Kanner wrote, 89 had “failed miserably and inflicted grave harm and perils on themselves and the communities in which they live.
After Kanner’s exposé, the nation was abuzz with the outrageous news of how a blueblood Baltimore society had coldheartedly exploited all those vulnerable people. “Record of Misery Traced in Freeing of Moronic Girls,” read a Washington Post headline the next day. Sweeping changes were made to ensure it could never happen again.
But Kanner was a hero for his time, not ours. He was genuinely concerned about the Rosewood girls, yes, but his detailed analysis of these “imbeciles’ ” reproductive behaviors doesn’t seem so benevolent today. One of the primary reasons Kanner was so incensed by the whole affair was that he believed intelligence, or lack thereof, was hereditary. Once these fertile women were set free in the world, he reasoned, their mentally defective offspring became a new strain of civic pestilence. From his perspective, the Rosewood girls’ feebleminded young would burden a nation already struggling to find its economic footing. In fact, by the time of his report, a total of 165 children had already been born to this troubled pool of 102 former Rosewood patients. And of this second generation, Kanner claimed, “108 are incontestably feebleminded.”
A typical case was that of “Edna May H.”
In 1924, a judge released [her] to a woman who wanted a maid. Edna May became a prostitute and, at least on one occasion, had sexual intercourse with her own brother. [She] now has four feebleminded, neglected, malnourished children who are often covered with scabies and live in dirty, vermin-infested quarters.
Based on such an avalanche of woe, Kanner assumed that these women—and the rest of us who are now suffering the social consequences of their unwise releases—would have been better off if they’d have been kept for life at Rosewood and away from the rest of the world. So while it’s clear enough that Wolf was the bad guy in this embarrassing American tale, was Kanner really the good guy?
People should be judged in historical context. Nonetheless, Kanner’s position is but a step or two away from forced sterilization of “undesirables.” Do the mentally challenged have the right to bear children? Today, most of us would unhesitatingly say “yes.” Yet Kanner thought the reproductive rights of those Rosewood girls were irrelevant due to the impact of their reproduction on society. “Time alone will tell how many more feebleminded, illegitimate, neglected children this group of released Rosewood patients will in the future bestow on a commonwealth that can do nothing but look on and pay the penalty for indiscriminate habeas corpus releases by its courts of justice,” he said. By keeping these poor thick souls safe behind the walls of Rosewood, Kanner concluded, everyone’s interests would have been protected. Out of sight, out of mind.
The Investigation:
The U.S. Justice Department has launched an investigation of the long-troubled Rosewood Center to determine whether conditions at the state's largest facility for profoundly disabled adults violate the residents' civil rights. Although the institution is set to close next summer, federal authorities will look into the treatment of residents, including safety issues and medical care, along with plans for their placement in the community, according to a letter sent to Gov. Martin O'Malley. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined yesterday to discuss details of the investigation, but state officials said federal investigators have requested numerous documents pertaining to policies, procedures and behavior-management techniques, as well as meeting minutes and staffing organizational charts. Those officials said conditions at Rosewood have improved significantly since reports last year of serious problems at the Owings Mills facility. The reported problems included a resident with a history of violence who stabbed another resident with a knife he stole on a field trip, patients receiving inadequate nutrition from feeding tubes and a woman who did not receive medical care for two weeks after ripping off her toenails. "I think they're responding to issues that were problematic then that are no longer problematic today," said Michael S. Chapman, director of the state's Developmental Disabilities Administration. Justice Department officials have not issued subpoenas or visited the facility, but they might visit next month, Chapman said. The letter informing the governor of the investigation was sent last month. In January, O'Malley announced plans to close the 120- year-old facility, which housed about 3,700 people at its peak. Today, 127 live there, and administrators are working closely with relatives to move each one to a smaller environment where they can receive the care they need, Chapman said. Virginia Knowlton, director of the Maryland Disability Law Center, which released a report last year detailing dangerous conditions at Rosewood, said she was surprised that the Justice Department was beginning the investigation now. "It seems a little behind the curve since the decision has already been made to close the facility," she said. "Perhaps the purpose is to monitor the closing process and oversee that transition." According to the letter, the Justice Department will investigate the state's efforts to ensure compliance with federal law and look for "systemic violations of constitutional or other federal rights." If violations are observed, the department will issue written findings, recommend remedies, and provide financial and technical assistance to the state. Jamie Hais, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said she was unable to comment on when the investigation is expected to be completed. Under the federal Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, the Justice Department may investigate allegations of abuse or neglect if the attorney general has previously notified state officials of a problem in writing, suggested corrections and allowed state officials "reasonable time to take appropriate corrective actions." In recent months, no significant problems have come to light in the state-mandated incident reports that Rosewood submits to the Maryland Disability Law Center, Knowlton said. The Justice Department has not asked Knowlton's office for information, although the center would be glad to assist in the investigation, she said. The state's Office of Health Care Quality recently completed its annual review of the facility, although the results have not been made public, according to its director, Wendy Kronmiller. In September, her office released a 160- page report documenting numerous problems including staff members' inability to control violent residents, missed mealtimes and indications that some residents repeatedly choke on food. The facility was founded in 1888 as the Asylum and Training School for the Feeble Minded and later named Rosewood State Hospital and Rosewood Center. Concerns about treatment there go back many years. From the 1950s through the 1970s, there were reports of rape, abuse, neglect, overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. One resident reportedly drowned in a bathtub. A 1981 Justice Department report found that residents "failed to receive minimally adequate care." The population of residents dwindled in recent decades as more families chose to keep disabled residents at home or place them in smaller care centers. In January 2007, new admissions to Rosewood were halted after a resident was found to be in immediate danger, and in August last year, the facility was found to be noncompliant in seven of eight conditions of licensure. Some disability advocacy groups rejoiced when informed of plans to close Rosewood, but the families of some residents protested, saying that their loved ones had been treated well. Elsie Platner, 82, of Severna Park said yesterday that she was pleased with the care her daughter received at Rosewood. Although her daughter was occasionally bitten or punched by other residents, the staff did the best they could, she said. Platner said that in May she moved her daughter, now 49, to a home run by Catholic Charities in Timonium only because of Rosewood's pending closure. "If it hadn't been for this, I wouldn't have moved her for anything," she said. Chapman said that conditions at Rosewood have improved as the staff has focused on caring for residents while making other arrangements for them. "You don't like for the Justice Department to come into a facility, but we have to demonstrate that we are doing what we need to be doing to ensure [the residents'] safety and welfare,
Rosewood Asylum
The Maryland Asylum and Training School for Feeble-minded was incorporated by the General Assembly in 1888, and its name was changed by the General Assembly of 1912 to Rosewood State Training School. It is a permanent charitable institution, owned and entirely supported by the State of Maryland.
The movement to establish a training school for feeble-minded patients had its origin largely in the efforts of Dr. Richard Gundry, then superintendent of the Spring Grove State Hospital, who in several reports called the attention of the state to the great need of doing something for the care and training of feeble-minded children. In consequence of his initiative, much interest was developed in several public-spirited philanthropists, among whom were Dr. J. Pembroke Thom, Gen. Herman Stump and Milton G. Urner. A small appropriation was obtained to establish such a school in the former residence of Dr. Wood, of the Navy, near Owings Mills, known as Rosewood. The first superintendent was Miss Martha M. Gundry, a daughter of Dr. Gundry, who, with a single teacher, opened the school in a small way in 1888. Miss Gundry continued in responsible charge for several years, and resigned to establish a school in Virginia. She was succeeded by several medical gentlemen, who held the office for comparatively brief periods. Dr. Thom continued much interested, and two of the cottages, Pembroke and Thom, bear his name. Gen. Herman Stump and Milton G. Urner are still connected with the board. Later the full development of the institution resulted in the appointment of Dr. F. W. Keating, who has been responsible for its work for the past 16 years.
The object of the institution is to furnish a home and a practical education for the feeble-minded children of the state who are not provided for in the public schools. Many children are of such defective understanding as to render them incapable of receiving proper training in the public schools, where they are brought into competition with those of normal intellect and where they cannot receive the especial care and attention absolutely necessary to secure mental development. In most instances they require training specially adapted to their condition, or they will become a burden upon their friends or the community; but by receiving kind and painstaking care and tuition at the hands of competent, experienced persons many of them become partly self-supporting under proper supervision. To care for and train such children to accomplish the results indicated, is the purpose of this institution.
Rosewood is situated about one-half mile from Owings Mills, in Baltimore County,. and is accessible by the Western Maryland Railroad and the Emory Grove electric cars. It is in the Green Spring Valley, and is beautifully and healthfully located upon a farm of 537 acres of land.
Children between the ages of 7 and 17 years who, by reason of mental defect, cannot be educated in ordinary schools, and who are not insane or greatly afflicted or deformed physically, are admitted into the institution free of charge for board and tuition, upon evidence being furnished of their inability to pay. Reasonable compensation is charged to those able to pay. It has a capacity of 700 children.
The group of buildings consists of a main or administration building and cottages which have been added from time to time, furnishing accommodation for 492 inmates, a school building and the necessary farm structures. In addition a custodial building for girls of low-grade type was completed in the spring of 1914, providing additional accommodations for 260 girls. This building is furnished with dormitories, day rooms, toilet and bath rooms, dining rooms and a scullery. On the first and second floors are large sleeping porches and in the basement is a large play room, which is used in inclement weather. The third floor is occupied by the nurses and attendants in the building, each having a separate bedroom, with a general sitting room for their comfort when not on duty with the children.
In the same year other improvements were made on the grounds. Two new stone barns and a large terra cotta silo were erected to replace old wooden structures, at a total cost of $10,584.41. An attractive stone gate lodge, with stone gateway, was also completed, at a cost of $3554, which adds greatly to the appearance of this entrance to the grounds.
The majority of the patients admitted are children under 15 years of age, at a time when they are susceptible of improvement by school instruction.
In the school department much attention is paid to manual training for the more advanced pupils and to kindergarten instruction for the younger ones. Each child is accorded the full advantages of class-room training when he or she is admitted to the institution within the limits of the school age. In the household department, sewing room, dining room, kitchen and laundry the work is entered into with much interest on the part of the patients. Their desire is great to do " something like work," and the improvement made in this branch of their training calls for still greater effort in the future, for such training saves them from a life of idleness and is one of the most important factors in developing the feebleminded along lines of economic efficiency.
The farming and clearing of land have been of substantial benefit to the boys, and the good derived from this work cannot be too highly estimated. The produce raised on the farm has furnished the institution with a supply of fresh vegetables at all seasons. The entire supply of milk is obtained from the school's own herd, and a great deal of the fresh meat has been obtained from the live stock fattened and butchered on the farm. During the biennial period of 1913-14 the market value of the farm products aggregated $32,923.63; also the value at local prices of work performed by farm teams in hauling and excavating would amount to $3977.10. The work on the farm furnishes one of the most effective means of developing, both mentally and physically, the boys committed to the institution. Some of those most useful on the farm were able to accomplish practically nothing in the school room, but the outdoor occupation seems to render them particularly docile and happy.
The per capita expense for maintenance during the period of 1913-14 was $4.58 weekly, an increase of 15 cents per patient over the preceding biennial period, which increase is due to the advance in the market price of many supplies and the general increase in the wages of employees.[1]
