contemplativeThis bill was lso called the Land-Grant Bill For Indigent Insane Persons, but its formal title was a bill "Making a grant of public lands to the several States for the benefit of indigent insane persons". It was proposed legislation that would have established asylums for the indigent insane, and also the blind, deaf, and dumb. It was proposed that the states would each be given federal land grants on which to establish special care homes for persons with these disabilities.
The bill was brought about by the initiative of activist Dorothea Dix, a woman who was born in Hampden, Maine in 1802, and who grew up in her wealthy grandmother's home in Boston. She fled the home at the age of twelve, to get away from her alcoholic family and abusive father. In 1821 at the age of 19 she opened a school in Boston, which was patronized by the well-to-do families. Soon afterwards she also began teaching poor and neglected children at home, but she suffered from health problems. In 1831 she established in Boston a model school for girls, and conducted this successfully until 1836, when her health again failed. In hopes of a cure, in 1836 she traveled to England, where she had met the Rathbone family, who were Quakers and prominent social reformers. They exposed Dix to what was known as the "British lunacy reform movement", a group that investigated conditions in asylums (known as "madhouses). The group published the results of their investigatiobn in reports to the House of Commons.
She returned to the United States in 1840 or 1841 and conducted an investigation into how her home state of Massachusetts cared for the insane poor. In most cases, towns contracted with local individuals to care for people with mental disorders who could not care for themselves, and who lacked family and friends to provide for them. This system produced widespread abuse. After her survey, Dix published the results in a report to the state legislature. Her report dislosed alarming conditions, which included persons with mental disorders being confined in cages, stalls, and pens. Many were chained, kept naked, beaten with rods, and disciplined with the lash to compel their obedience. The outcome of her lobbying was a bill to expand the state's mental hospital in Worcester.
Dix travelled from New Hampshire to Louisiana, reporting on the condition of the indigent mentally disabled, publishing reports to state legislatures, and devoting enormous personal energy to working with committees to draft the enabling legislation and appropriations bills needed to build proper asylums. In 1846, she travelled to Illinois to study mental illness, but while there, she became ill once again and spent the winter in Springfield recovering. As she recovered, she worked on a report to the January 1847 legislative session, which adopted legislation to establish Illinois' first state mental hospital.
In 1849, when the North Carolina State Medical Society was formed, the construction of an institution in Raleigh for the care of mentally ill patients was authorized by the legislature. The hospital, was named in honor of Dorothea Dix, and it opened in 1856. She was also a driving force behind the founding of the first public mental hospital in Pennsylvania, the Harrisburg State Hospital in 1853.
In 1854 she was able to convince the US Congress to pass the Bill for the Benefit of the Indigent Insane, legislation which authorized 12,225,000 acres of Federal land to be given to the states, to be used for the benefit of the insane as well as for persons who were blind, deaf and dumb. The bill passed both houses of Congress, but in 1854 President Franklin Pierce vetoed it. In his veto message, Pierce said that the federal government should not commit itself to social welfare, which was properly the responsibility of the states.
Dix was devastated by the defeat of her land bill. In 1855 she traveled to England and Europe, where she reconnected with the Rathbones and conducted investigations of Scotland's madhouses that resulted in the formation of the Scottish Lunacy Commission.
The bill is considered by some historians as a landmark in social welfare legislation in the United States. Pierce's veto established a precedent for federal non-participation in social welfare that lasted over 70 years, until the New Deal of the 1930s. No further federal legislation on mental health occurred for over 90 years until 1946 when the National Mental Health Act was passed, establishing federal mental health policy.