Date of Award

Summer 8-1-2025

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

History

First Advisor

Nicholas Juravich

Second Advisor

Bonnie Miller

Third Advisor

Timothy Hasci

Abstract

Cannibalizing the Starving analyzes how the American ruling class and their institutions perceptually disabled people in poverty alongside the repercussions of this disablement within the late 19th and early 20th century. This thesis deploys an anarchist framework of understanding hierarchies, the state, and violence is utilized alongside critical disability studies to understand how disability was socially constructed in the context of poverty. Further, much of the framing involved is from the context of labor or those who could not or did not labor. At the heart of the issue is understanding seemingly innocuous language used to denigrate those in poverty as violent alongside the use of institutions such as the workhouse or almshouse to inflict violence against people in poverty. People in poverty had their rights and dignity stripped from them due to their economic position as their poverty was considered an active choice and at times was seen as inherited. The first two chapters heavily utilize archival materials from the Massachusetts State Archives and the UMASS Boston Special Collections, specifically the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Collection. Key to this work is that the social disablement of people in poverty was not an inevitability but was a choice as socialists fought for the basic respect and recognition for people in poverty. Further to these socialists, specifically the Industrial Workers of the World, is that poor laws and the language of disablement were utilized against them to politically repress, harass, and denigrate them. The dispossession of people in poverty was founded on the idea that poverty was a choice somehow innate to a person’s mind or body which justified their oppression to force labor from them. We as a society never escaped from this mindset and the thesis juxtaposes the present with the past to signify the current day’s repercussions.

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