I am myself deaf. My greatest obstacle is not my deafness, but to overcome the prejudice and ignorance of those who do not understand what the deaf can do.
Hanson's letter to President Theodore Roosevelt, November 18, 1908
Olof Hanson, c. 1890.
The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) was established in 1880, "...to deliberate on the needs of the deaf as a class." Among numerous issues facing the National Association of the Deaf were employment, access to education using a visual (sign) language, and eugenics, an emerging pseudo-scientific movement aimed at creating a better race through selective breeding. Olof Hanson, eloquently and forcefully, spoke out on issues impacting deaf lives in the early twentieth century.
In 1883 the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act instituted exams and barred any applicant deemed physically or mentally unfit for employment. The U.S. Civil Service Commissioners added "deafness" and "loss of speech" to a pre-existing list of "defects" in 1906. Commissioners reasoned that they had difficulty finding positions for deaf workers because employers were unwilling to hire deaf applicants.
Hanson wrote a persuasive letter to President Theodore Roosevelt requesting that action be taken to remove the conditions that triggered employment discrimination for deaf people. Just before leaving office, Roosevelt rescinded the "deaf" provision allowing deaf people to take the exams.
Excerpt from Hanson's letter to President Theodore Roosevelt, November 18, 1908.
Secretary James Garfield's response to Olof Hanson's letter, December 1908.
In 1910, Hanson became the eighth president of the National Association of the Deaf. Pictured here, he is the sixth person from the left on the second to last row.
Close up view of photograph of Olof Hanson as eighth President of the National Association of the Deaf.
The educational debate of teaching methodology for deaf children was a paramount issue throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Concerned with successful assimilation into society, educators who supported the oral method of teaching speech and lip reading were growing in numbers. They argued that signing would limit deaf children's employment opportunities and interactions with hearing people.
National Association of the Deaf Impostors Bureau sticker, 1917. In 1911, Hanson founded the Imposter Bureau encouraging state governments to pass laws prohibiting hearing people from impersonating as deaf peddlers. When Hanson's term ended in 1913, at least five states passed laws that would make peddling, while posing as a deaf person, illegal.
One of the main challenges during Hanson's presidency of the National Association of the Deaf was to change society's perception of deaf people. He knew deaf people should be viewed as contributing citizens, not objects of charity. Peddlers, deaf or impersonating deaf individuals, presented an image that was unacceptable to Hanson and other NAD leaders.
As the National Association of the Deaf president, Hanson wrote in 1912 a letter to Mr. Carroll G. Pearse, President of the National Education Association, advocating the use of sign language, speech, and lip-reading then known as the combined system.
"You say, 'The sign language should never be taught.' That is where you are wrong. It is not necessary to teach signs in the school room: but the sign language should have a place in every well regulated school for chapel exercises, lectures, debates, etc.
A deaf person, educated exclusively by the oral method, can never understand a sermon, or enjoy a lecture, or participate in a debate. A lecture like yours for instance can never be understood through lip-reading. But by means of the sign language it can be interpreted so that the deaf can understand it as fully as people who hear. And the sign language is the only means by which this can be done.
The deaf who use signs may get less speech, but they develop more brains."
Excerpt from Olof Hanson's letter to Carroll G. Pearse, 1912
