“Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” may be the one of the most famous lines in American history.
These are the words, of course, that Alexander Graham Bell supposedly said on the first time he successfully used his newly invented telephone on March 10, 1876.
Thinking about the call and Bell – who is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday, a 10-cent stamp issued in 1940, when Bell was one of the 35 people pictured on a series of stamps honoring “Famous Americans” – my mind goes in two distinctly different directions: one bemusedly juvenile and the other a quite serious about Bell’s legacy.
The juvenile part of me keeps jumping to all sort of possibilities. Did Watson have Called ID. If he did, would he have taken the call. What if Watson had answered but said, “Hi, this is Tom. I can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message after the beep and I’ll call you back.”
Or, what if after Watson came in the room, Bell said he was from the Police Aid Society and wondered if Watson would like to make a contribution? (In one of his books, Dave Barry wondered if they kept a record of such donations at the 911 switchboard so they could have a conversation more, or less, along the following lines: “Let’s see, Mr. Luberoff,” they’d say, “You say someone is breaking into your house. I see here that you hung up when we called and asked for money. Yeah, we should be there in a few hours.”).
Yes, the possibilities are endless because the phone and its successors – all the way to Zoom – are great enablers that also can be great distractions. Bell, who went on co-found AT&T, knew this so well that he refused to have a telephone in his study (though he had several in the house). After he died, his wife Mabel wrote, “of course, he never had one in his study. That was where he went when he wanted to be alone with his thoughts and his work. The telephone, of course, means intrusion by the outside world.”
The intrusions, apparently, would deter Bell from the other key interests of his life. Bell, who, like his father, worked with people who were dear, as one of the most prominent proponents of oralism, the controversial belief that people who are deaf “should” communicate by the use of speech and lip-reading rather than sign language. Moreover, Bell, who also was interested heredity and animal breeding, was an early supporter of eugenics. And, to round things out, he also supported restrictions on immigration of what he termed ‘undesirable ethnical elements,’ in order to encourage the ‘evolution of a higher and nobler type of man in America.'” movement.
As the website for “Through Deaf Eyes,” documentary on 200 years of Deaf life in America that will be airing later this month on PBS, explains: “His views on immigration, deaf education, and eugenics overlapped and intertwined.” Bell argued, for example, that “a ‘great calamity’ was facing the nation: deaf people were forming clubs, socializing with one another and, consequently, marrying other deaf people. The creation of a ‘deaf race’ that yearly would grow larger and more insular was underway.”
The site goes on to note that while some “some eugenicists called for legislation outlawing intermarriage by deaf people…Bell rejected such a ban as impractical. Instead he proposed the following steps: ‘(1) Determine the causes that promote intermarriages among the deaf and dumb; and (2) remove them. The causes he sought to remove were sign language, deaf teachers, and residential schools. His solution was the creation of special day schools taught by hearing teachers who would enforce a ban on sign language.”
However, the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) and other community organizations fought, with some success, against his efforts. As George W. Veditz, who served as president of NAD and was one of the first people to film ASL, once noted (originally in ASL), “We American deaf are now facing bad times for our schools. False prophets are now appearing, announcing to the public that our American means of teaching the deaf are all wrong. These men have tried to educate the public and make them believe that the oral method is really the one best means of educating the deaf. But we American deaf know, the French deaf know, the German deaf know that in truth, the oral method is the worst….As long as we have deaf people on earth, we will have signs.”
Despite his controversial views, Bell was a legendary figure. At the conclusion of his funeral in 1922, for example, every phone in North America was silenced for a moment in his honor. And yet, in retrospect, it seems like something was missing in the messages he got on some critically important issues in his time. And that is no laughing matter.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.