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Page and make it the medium of instruction for teaching French language and culture to the deaf-mutes of his country. 13
Stokoe observed that at Gallaudet it was as if Épée had never existed. No one, not even the deaf students and deaf faculty,
believed that their signing was a suitable medium of instruction, much less a legitimate language. Many of the hearing faculty could barely use the language and were unaware that their students' grammatical errors resulted from the differences between their language and English. Stokoe put it mildly when he declared "It is greatly to be regretted that from Épée's day to the present, his grasp of the structure of the situation of the congenitally deaf confronted with a language of hearing persons has escaped so many working in the same field."14
Lou Fant is less diplomatic in his assessment of the situation at Gallaudet at that time. Oralism had gained such a foothold, he saysat Gallaudet and elsewhere in the United Statesthat the deaf were lucky hearing people used signs at all. Sign certainly wasn't viewed as a language it was "just the way you talk to deaf people" To challenge that premise was almost unthinkable:
Gallaudet was the hub around which the education of deaf children spun. Its graduates went out into the countryside and became tomorrow's leaders. It had an august position and was extremely proud of that position . . . Its hard now, in the wake of all that's happened, to understand the feeling that we had to work with oralism in order to improve the education of deaf children. It was as if we had to calm and allay the oralists' fears that "manual communication" deserved serious consideration, or else the world would come to an end in an Armageddon between the two philosophies. The war had been fought for so many years that, now that a kind of truce was in effect, we dared not jeopardize it. We handled the oralists with kid gloves, fearful that, like a bomb, they might explode and take us with them. That they did have power is true. They had friends in high places and lots of money to back them. We had only the truth, and we weren't too sure about that.15
Bill Stokoe was becoming more and more convinced of "the

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