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Angel Unaware, Cognitive Disability, and the Politics of Positive Thinking
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2025
abstract
This article focuses on what may very well be the most popular text about cognitive disability in US American history. Released in 1953, Angel Unaware told the story of Hollywood stars Dale Evans’ and Roy Rogers’s experiences raising a young daughter who had been diagnosed at birth with what her mother referred to as an “appalling handicap” (what would later be labeled Down Syndrome). Situating this work and its reception within existing scholarship on postwar religion in the United States, this essay offers a novel interpretation of positive-thinking Christianity by showing how its grammars inspired and underwrote a nascent politics of disability for parents of “exceptional” children and their allies. In doing so, it not only underscores how religion has shaped notions of human difference in US American culture but also identifies disability as a crucial and heretofore neglected site of American religion making.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
References
Notes
1 Rogers, Dale Evans, Angel Unaware (Westwood, NJ: Fleming Revell, 1953), 7Google Scholar.
2 On the parent confessional as genre, see Trent, James, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Intellectual Disability in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 222–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This essay reproduces dated and offensive language. When doing so, I emphasize that these idioms are my subjects’ and not my own. In my own voice, I refer to persons with cognitive disabilities and impairments. My choice to retain some of my subjects’ language is, in keeping with the program of disability history, to emphasize the contingency of our categories for mapping the “normal” and its imagined opposites. For more on classifications of cognitive impairment and the activism that has driven the most recent shifts in vocabulary, see Ford, Marty, Acosta, Annie, and Sutcliffe, T. J., “Beyond Terminology: The Policy Impact of a Grassroots Movement,” Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities 51, no. 2 (2013): 108–12CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
3 For select historians of cognitive disability’s engagements with Angel Unaware, see Brockley, Janice, “Rearing the Child Who Never Grew: Ideologies of Parenting and Intellectual Disability in American History,” in Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader, ed. Trent, James and Noll, Steven (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 149–50Google Scholar; Kathleen Jones, “Education for Children with Mental Retardation: Parent Activism, Public Policy, and Family Ideology in the 1950s,” in Trent and Noll, Mental Retardation in America, 325–26; Carey, Allison, On the Margins of Citizenship: Intellectual Disability and Civil Rights in Twentieth-Century America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Katherine Castles, “Little ‘Tardies’: Mental Retardation, Race, and Class in American Society, 1945–1965” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2006), 152–63. For what may be the lone reference to Angel Unaware in the field of US religious history (and for information on its status as the third-best-selling book in the country), see Williams, Peter, Popular Religion in America: Symbolic Change and the Modernization Process in Historical Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 167 Google Scholar.
4 Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 222.
5 Carey, On the Margins, 112. Historians of disability have often had little interest in the text’s theological and/or ontological claims, favoring what are presumed to be its discrete political priorities. See, for example, Wehmeyer, Michael and Schalock, Robert, “The Parent Movement: Late Modern Times,” in The Story of Intellectual Disability: An Evolution of Meaning, Understanding, and Public Perception, ed. Wehmeyer, Michael (Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing, 2003), 189 Google Scholar: “[Angel Unaware’s] overtly Christian messages overlies, and to some degree disguises, what was becoming a secular 1950s message about hope, possibility, and the potential for children with disabilities.” My argument here resists such a division by insisting that it was the book’s ability to plug into overtly spiritual registers that explains its success and political power.
6 Belser, Julia Watts, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole (Boston: Beacon Press, 2023), 166 Google Scholar.
7 For more on some of the raced and racializing dynamics of these changes, see Katherine Castles, “‘Nice, Average Americans’: Postwar Parents’ Groups and the Defense of the Normal Family,” in Trent and Noll, Mental Retardation in America, 351–70.
8 It is indisputable that Roy Rogers embodied American whiteness for many within the public imagination. But it was also the case that Rogers identified, throughout his career, as having “Choctaw blood” from his mother’s side. Sometimes this was a point of reference for explaining the entertainer’s “oriental eyes,” which, in a dizzying knot of racializing references, were referred to in Angel Unaware as a possible explanation for Robin’s “mongoloid features” prior to her diagnosis. In another instance, it was reported that Rogers’s ancestry provided the grounds for the Rogerses’ adoption of their daughter Dodie, who is Choctaw. For some indigenous Americans, word of Rogers’s heritage and his fame were sources of pride. In 1967, he was named the year’s “Outstanding American Indian” by tribes participating in the thirty-sixth annual American Indian Exposition in Anadarko, Oklahoma. See, for example, “Roy Rogers is No. 1 Indian,” Oakland Tribune (California), August 11, 1967, 3; and Richard Severo, “Roy Rogers, Singing Cowboy, Dies at 86,” New York Times, July 7, 1998, B10. For an example of how, for some, knowledge of Rogers’s ancestry provided occasion to reinforce rather than destabilize racist tropes and hierarchies, see the coverage of their adoption of Dodie in “Dale and Roy Capture Wild Little Indian,” Los Angeles Daily News, November 13, 1953, 42. For a helpful account of such complex identifications and scholars’ (mis)handling of them, see Amy M. Ware, “Unexpected Cowboy, Unexpected Indian: The Case of Will Rogers,” Ethnohistory 56, no. 1 (2009): 1–34. For more on the Rogerses’ role in the promotion of adoption, with a focus on adoptees outside of North America, see Chung, Soojin, Adopting for God: The Mission to Change America Through Transnational Adoption (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 40–45 Google Scholar. It should be noted that it was likely Robin’s disability that inclined the Rogers toward adoption in the first place. There are additional connections here with Pearl Buck, whom Chung names “the Mother of transracial adoption.”
9 Bernstein, Robin, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
10 In this article, I refer to the couple as “the Rogerses.” Evans went by both Dale Evans and Dale Evans Rogers in different contexts. Here I will refer to her as “Evans” for the sake of clarity and her husband as “Rogers.”
11 To the point: Rogers’s longtime band was named the Sons of the Pioneers.
12 As one fan explained to Rogers and Evans, “I feel like I know you. There are pictures of you all over the house.” Garrison, Maxine, The Angel Spreads Her Wings: The Inspiration of Angel Unaware and the Influence of the Roy Rogers Family in the American Home (Westwood, NJ: Fleming Revell, 1956), 121 Google Scholar. For broader accounts of the Rogerses’ careers, see Rogers, Roy and Evans, Dale, with Jane and Stern, Michael, Happy Trails: Our Life Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994)Google Scholar; White, Raymond E., King of the Cowboys, Queen of the West: Roy Rogers and Dale Evans (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press/Popular Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Davis, Elsie Miller, The Answer is God: The Inspiring Personal Story of Dale Evans and Roy Rogers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955)Google Scholar. For more on the relationship between Westerns as a genre and postwar consumerism, see Conrad, JoAnn, “Consuming Subjects: Making Sense of Post-World War II Westerns,” Narrative Culture 2, no. 1 (2015): 71–116 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Rogers’s “Cowboy Prayer” read as follows, “Oh Lord, I reckon I’m not much just by myself. I fail to do a lot of things I ought to do. But Lord, when the trails are steep and passes high, help me ride it straight the whole way through. And when in the falling dusk I get the final call, I do not care how many flowers they send—Above all else the happiest trail would be for You to say to me, ‘Let’s ride, My friend.’ Amen.” See Davis, The Answer is God, 116.
14 Indeed, Peter La Chapelle has argued that it was precisely through this period and figures like the Rogerses that “the country-music-singing cowboy” was divorced from the “liberal-populist moorings” of previous generations and transformed into “an emblem of a new, white suburban form of Americanism” that became central to a reconfigured right in national politics. La Chapelle, Peter, Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California (Oakland: University of California Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on the Rogerses’ embodiment of this trend, including their later embrace of campaigns like Anita Bryant’s anti-gay activism and Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential bid, see La Chapelle, Proud to be an Okie, 139–43. For an account that emphasizes evangelicalism’s central role in these reconfigurations, see Du Mez, Kristin Kobes, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020)Google Scholar.
15 “Chit-Chat,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 8, 1950, 11.
16 Davis, The Answer is God, 120.
17 My narrative of the Rogerses’ experiences here is based upon several biographical and autobiographical sources, including Davis, The Answer is God; Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings; and Kirtley Baskette, “The Gift of Debbie,” Good Housekeeping (March 1965), 92–93, 190, 192, 194, 196. Throughout my description of these events, I highlight variations in the ways in which Evans recounted the story of her daughter’s life. I do so to stress the fact that Evans’s telling and retelling of these events were meant to achieve particular rhetorical ends with respect to the meanings of disability and Evans’s authority as a writer, Christian, and mother. The fact that she had the opportunity to tell and retell this story, with variations, in many venues, further attests to its uptake.
18 On changing mid-century etiology surrounding this category, see Benda, Clemens, Mongolism and Cretinism (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1949); and Benda, Clemens, Down’s Syndrome: Mongolism and Its Management (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1969)Google Scholar. The category “mongolism” derived from racist nineteenth-century genetic theories that suggested that features ascribed to putatively inferior races might resurface within populations as “atavisms.” The British physician John Langdon Down assigned this label to a condition he first described in the 1860s, on account of what he saw as resemblance between the persons he studied and the so-called “Mongol race.” In the mid-twentieth century, professionals and other public commentators generally lamented the use of this category. In Benda’s Mongolism and Cretinism, he attempted to disprove Down’s theory of “racial mutation” by offering comparisons of the eyes of persons with this condition and individuals labeled “Chinese.” It must be noted that refutations like Benda’s objected to the notion of racial recursion but not necessarily to the notion of race or racial hierarchy. On the history of these terms and Benda’s role in their revision, see Luisa Rodríguez-Hernández, M. and Montoya, Eladio, “Fifty Years of Evolution of the Term Down’s Syndrome,” Lancet 378, no. 9789 (2011): 402 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a reflection on the “notions” of race and disability, and evidence of their co-constitution in this category, see Chen, Mel, “‘The Stuff of Slow Constitution’: Reading Down Syndrome for Race, Disability and the Timing that Makes Them So,” Somatechnics 6, no. 2 (2016): 235–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 On the history of these accounts, see Brockley, “Rearing the Child Who Never Grew”; and Carey, On the Margins of Citizenship.
20 See, for example, Lucille Stout, I Reclaimed My Child: The Story of a Family into which a Retarded Child Was Born (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1959)Google Scholar. Stout recounts medical professionals pleading with her to institutionalize her child—pleading to which she initially submitted. She later came to regret her decision and described such advice as communicating the following: “We don’t want your child in our society. We have no place for her here. We don’t want to think of such people, or be reminded that they exist, so please keep her put away out of our sight” (50).
21 Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 137. For another example of parents receiving the same advice, see Abraham, Willard, Barbara: A Prologue (New York: Rinehart and Co., 1958), 55 Google Scholar.
22 For one parent’s irritation with the inaccessibility of Evans’s story on account of her wealth, see Stout, I Reclaimed My Child, 34, cited in Brockley, “Rearing the Child Who Never Grew,” 94.
23 Davis, The Answer is God, 136, 140–47.
24 Davis, The Answer is God, 128.
25 See, for example, parents’ accounts from the 1950s, reported in McDonald, Eugene, Understand Those Feelings: A Guide for Parents of Handicapped Children and Everyone Who Counsels Them (Pittsburgh: Stanwix House, 1962)Google Scholar.
26 Buck, Pearl, The Child Who Never Grew (New York: J. Day Co., 1950)Google Scholar.
27 Angel Unaware was the first in a long list of books that Evans published with evangelical presses. See, for example, Rogers, Dale Evans, My Spiritual Diary (Westwood, NJ: Fleming Revell, 1955)Google Scholar; Christmas is Always (Westwood, NJ: Fleming Revell, 1958); Dearest Debbie (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming Revell, 1965); Where He Leads (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming Revell, 1974); The Home Stretch, with Floyd Thatcher (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1986).
28 Davis, The Answer is God, 218.
29 Davis, The Answer is God, 218.
30 Unlike the accounts I am relying on most closely here, in others, Evans left out descriptions of her fumbling efforts to write. For example, in one instance, she described her discovery about Robin’s identity and her writing of what came to be Angel Unaware as relatively simultaneous experiences. In both versions of the story, however, what is made clear is that Evans understood the text of Angel Unaware to come from beyond herself. As she told one journalist, “I know I didn’t write it.” Baskette, “The Gift of Debbie,” 194. See also Rogers, Dale Evans, “Foreword to the paperback edition,” in Angel Unaware (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming Revell, 1963)Google Scholar.
31 Davis, The Answer is God, 219.
32 Baskette, “The Gift of Debbie,” 194; Davis, The Answer is God, 219; Garrison The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 37. On the “blurry” relationship between the spiritualist practice of automatic writing and later Protestant practices of inspired devotional writing, see Taves, Ann, Revelatory Events: Three Case Studies of the Emergence of New Spiritual Paths (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016), 131 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 See, for example, Gutierrez, Cathy, Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism and the American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buescher, John, The Other Side of Salvation: Spiritualism and the Nineteenth-Century Religious Experience (Boston: Skinner House, 2004)Google Scholar; Seeman, Erik, Speaking with the Dead in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)Google Scholar; Kwilecki, Susan, “Ghosts, Meanings, and Faith: After-Death Communications in Bereavement Narratives,” Death Studies 35, no. 3 (2011): 219–43CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. For a recent example that has much in common with Angel Unaware, see Young, Bryan, Meant for Heaven: A Little Girl’s Journey to Paradise (Springville, UT: Cedar Fort Publishing, 2017)Google Scholar.
34 On the book’s sales and serialization, see Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 82.
35 Of Peale’s profile within the broader scope of American Christianity, the eminent historian of religion Sydney Ahlstrom once wrote, “[He] was as important for the religious revival of the fifties as George Whitefield had been for the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century.” Ahlstrom, Sydney, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 956 Google Scholar. This quotation also appears in George, Carol, God’s Salesman: Norman Vincent Peale and the Power of Positive Thinking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 156 Google Scholar.
36 Peale, Norman Vincent, The Power of Positive Thinking (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1952)Google Scholar, vii.
37 Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking. On Peale’s career, see George, God’s Salesman; Lane, Christopher, Piety, Surge: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; and Sherwood, Timothy, The Rhetorical Leadership of Fulton J. Sheen, Norman Vincent People, and Billy Graham in the Age of Extremes (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013)Google Scholar.
38 To be sure, Peale was not alone in preaching this gospel or something like it. Peers with whom he shared common ground included the preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, Rabbi Joshua Liebman, and Robert Schuller, founder of California’s Crystal Cathedral. For more on this broader milieu, see Heinz, Andrew, Jews and the American Soul: Human Nature in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 195–216; Matthew Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Mulder, Mark and Martí, Gerardo, The Glass Church: Robert H. Schuller, The Crystal Cathedral, and the Strain of Megachurch Ministry (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020)Google Scholar.
39 Gordon, Arthur, One Man’s Way: The Story and Message of Norman Vincent Peale, Minister to Millions (Pawling, NY: Foundation for Christian Living, 1972)Google Scholar, quoted in George, God’s Salesman, 129.
40 For a summary of some of these concerns, see Roy Eckardt, A., The Surge of Piety in America: An Appraisal (New York: Association Press, 1958)Google Scholar. See also, George, God’s Salesman, 123–56.
41 Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 47.
42 Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 47. By Buck’s own lights in The Child Who Never Grew, she locates “hope” in her daughter’s story and life, but it is primarily the hope of working with others to improve conditions for people with cognitive disabilities and to eliminate such forms of difference through scientific cure.
43 Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 48. It must be noted, again, that the details of Evans’s narrative(s) shifted in different tellings. In another version, she encounters Peale’s work much earlier. The point, however, remains the same: namely, that circumstances—forces beyond her—conspire to bring her to the point of publishing Angel Unaware. For a different version of events, see Davis, The Answer is God, 221–22.
44 Peale, Norman Vincent, A Guide to Confident Living (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1948)Google Scholar.
45 Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 48.
46 Peale, A Guide to Confident Living, 215.
47 In this chapter of A Guide to Confident Living, the reader gets a sense of some of the proscriptive and perhaps more punitive implications of Peale’s theology. He commands readers not to “hamper [their deceased loved ones] with . . . dark and dismal thoughts of grief. They have earned joy and delight. Do not spoil it for them” (217).
48 Davis, The Answer is God, 221.
49 Evans, Angel Unaware, 12.
50 Evans, Angel Unaware, 12.
51 Evans, Angel Unaware, 52.
52 Evans, Angel Unaware, 27, emphasis in original.
53 Evans, Angel Unaware, 52.
54 Evans, Angel Unaware, 18, 21.
55 Evans, Angel Unaware, 23, 46, 35, 18, 30. Katherine Castles has made a consonant point about the rhetorical force of Robin’s naïveté, which she describes it as “deceptively gentle.” Castles, “Little ‘Tardies,’” 156.
56 Evans, Angel Unaware, 25.
57 As Allison Carey explains, mental deficiency professionals in this period often based their recommendations for parents to institutionalize their children on the argument that “the presence of the disabled child at home would destroy the abilities of the family to function normally.” Carey, On the Margins of Citizenship, 116.
58 Evans, “Foreword to the paperback edition,” 7.
59 Evans, Angel Unaware, 57, 58.
60 Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking, xiii.
61 Peale, “Introduction,” in Angel Unaware, 6.
62 Despite extensive searching, it does not seem that the letters Garrison used are extant. This, of course, means that those we have access to have been curated by the person whose job it was to cultivate a positive and lucrative image of the Rogers family. While this fact certainly prevents us from knowing about what was surely a wider range of responses to Angel Unaware, Garrison’s public archive still offers an invaluable window onto several kinds of reader reaction.
63 Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 93.
64 Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 98–99.
65 Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 105.
66 Charles Allen, “‘Angel Unaware’ Lifts the Heart,” Atlanta Constitution, March 23, 1953, 4. See also, International News Service, “Roy and Dale Tell Story of Doomed Tot,” Atlanta Constitution, March 15, 1953, 14A; Ruth Gans Willett, “Letters,” Courier-Journal, March 11, 1953, 8.
67 Evans, Angel Unaware, 31.
68 Evans, Angel Unaware, 46.
69 Evans, ““Foreword to the paperback edition,” 9.
70 Evans, ““Foreword to the paperback edition,” 10; Davis, The Answer is God, 176.
71 See, for example, McDonagh, Patrick, Idiocy: A Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Metzler, Irina, Fools and Idiots? Intellectual Disability in the Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Puccinelli, Patricia, Yardsticks: Retarded Characters and Their Roles in Fiction (New York: P. Lang, 1995)Google Scholar; and Berger, James, The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity (New York: New York University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
72 On criticisms of the so-called “easy religion” of Peale, Rabbi Joshua Liebman, and others, see Marty, Martin, “The Popular Religious Revival Is . . . Tied to a Popular Patriotism,” in Modern American Religion, Volume 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar.
73 Miller, William A., “Some Negative Thinking About Norman Vincent Peale,” in Piety along the Potomac: Notes on Politics and Morals in the Fifties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 143 Google Scholar, emphasis in original.
74 Eckardt, The Surge of Piety in America, 84.
75 Lane, Surge of Piety; Kruse, Kevin, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015)Google Scholar. Kruse locates the Rogerses among his stable of “pitchmen for piety,” who by the early 1960s had joined forces with other “sunbelt evangelicals” in their reinvention of American conservatism (153–55). For an earlier, equally critical account of Peale’s ministry and its connection to questions of political economy, see Meyer, Donald, The Positive Thinkers: A Study of the American Quest for Health, Wealth and Personal Power from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965)Google Scholar.
76 Lofton, Kathryn, “Resurgent Christianity,” review of Christopher Douglas, If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2016)Google Scholar, and of Lane, Christopher, Piety, Surge: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016),Google Scholar in American Literary History 30, no. 1 (2018): 177–87. Lane’s account underemphasizes how this new creed might have been a response to the United States’ racial politics and emergent civil rights movement. For more on race and religion’s public entanglements in this period, see Ribovich, Leslie, Without a Prayer: Religion and Race in New York City Public Schools (New York: New York University Press, 2024)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
77 To clarify further, my aim is not to tangle in debates and juxtapositions between “agency” and “ideology,” “people” and “structures”; rather, it is to provide further depth to our understandings of how positive thinking as a set of discursive resources was mobilized and made to move in this moment. This depth, I think, encourages us to continue to be mindful of potentials we might otherwise overlook. For an example of the endurance of some of the abovementioned debates within the field of American religious studies, see Lum, Kathryn Gin, “The Historyless Heathen and the Stagnating Pagan: History as Non-Native Category?,” Religion and American Culture 28, no. 1 (2019): 52–91 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For examples of scholars who have offered more complex political accounts of positive thinking, specifically in earlier iterations of New Thought and its offspring, see Satter, Berryl, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Weisenfeld, Judith, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.
78 Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 122.
79 Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 117.
80 Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 117.
81 Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 140.
82 Because Evans provided an occasion for pride in their loved ones, one parent later wrote, “A lot of us believe Dale Evans set us free.” Sobsey, Dick, “Dale Evans and the Great Rescue: A Parent’s View,” Mental Retardation 39, no. 5 (2001): 401–42.0.CO;2>CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
83 For a useful introduction to the medical model of disability, as well as its limitations, see Adams, Rachel, Reiss, Benjamin, and Serlin, David, “Disability,” in Keywords for Disability Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
84 Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 126–28, esp. 124.
85 Wehmeyer and Schalock, “The Parent Movement,” 215–18; “The Christmas Parade Float: ‘Angel Unaware,’” Sapulpa Daily Herald (Oklahoma), December 4, 1964, 2; Grace Conway, “History of Noble Industries, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1952–1973,” 46, unpublished manuscript, Indiana Historical Society, Library Manuscript Collection, SC 2051.
86 Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 145. Other parent-authors writing in Evans’s wake framed their projects and advocacy in similar ways. Take, for example, the Catholic B. R. Schmalzried, who concluded his memoir about his daughter with a cognitive disability with the following prayer: “My dear God, I believe from the bottom of my heart that this story is the message I received through my daughter, Mary Margaret. This message had such a profound effect upon me, I want to share it with others. For this reason, I have tried to become an assistant to [my daughter] to help her deliver Your message to my friends and neighbors.” Schmalzried, B. R., Sunshine: A Slow Miracle (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1965), 102 Google Scholar.
87 “My Angel Without Wings,” Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Archive, 1885–2008, Fan Mail, Publications, and Ephemera (Series 3), MSA.24, boxes 122–23, unprocessed, Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles.
88 Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 130.
89 The texts within disability history that have discussed this book have rightly emphasized what we might think of as the symbolic violence of the book’s performance of voicing. Scholars like Janice Brockley have suggested that the child Robin “disappear[s]” in Angel Unaware behind Evans: Brockley “Rearing the Child Who Never Grew,” 150. In this view, the text reduces Robin to a “rhetorical extension” of her mother. While I share Brockley’s concerns about how Angel Unaware might have reinforced broader assumptions about persons with disabilities’ supposed disqualification from representing themselves (which, in turn, function to justify any number of dispossessions), I am also inclined to consider the book’s performance of inspired writing as one parent’s effort to theorize subjectivity and her relationship to her child in ways that could not ultimately be reduced to two discrete, autonomous persons. In this respect, I think Evans’s effort resonates with still live questions within the field of disability studies about care, representation, surrogacy, and intersubjectivity. See, for example, Kittay, Eva, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (New York: Routledge, 1999)Google Scholar. On “rhetorical extension,” see Johnson, Barbara, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 29–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on this point, see Andrew Walker-Cornetta, “Unsingular Subjects,” American Religion, online, October 2019, accessed May 16, 2023, https://www.american-religion.org/provocations/unsingular.
90 Orsi, Robert, You, Thank, St, . Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996)Google Scholar. Other relevant examples include: Rouse, Carolyn, “‘If She’s a Vegetable, We’ll Be Her Garden’: Embodiment, Transcendence, and Citations of Competing Cultural Metaphors in the Case of a Dying Child,” American Ethnologist 31, no. 4 (2004): 514–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Opp, James, The Lord for the Body: Religion, Medicine and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880–1930 (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Karen McCarthy, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Langford, Jean, Consoling Ghosts: Stories of Medicine and Mourning from Southeast Asians in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
91 My thinking here is indebted to Ahmed, Sara, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
92 Garrison, The Angel Spreads Her Wings, 124.
93 Norman Vincent Peale, “How to Handle a Handicap,” Pittsburg Press, June 3, 1956, 148.
94 Indeed, in another context, the late historian Paul Longmore highlighted how inspirational stories involving people with physical disabilities as emblems of a “positive outlook” get mobilized against the provision of public resources, demanding instead “personal adjustment, striving, and achievement.” Angel Unaware seems to provide both evidence and counter-evidence for such an observation. Longmore, Paul, Book, Why I Burned My: And Other Essays on Disability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 139 Google Scholar.