A Disability History of the United States

by Kim E. Nielsen

  By 1979, however, Blatt had given up on reform. He bluntly concluded, “We must evacuate the institutions for the mentally retarded.”30 Blatt and others would expand the push for deinstitutionalization.

  WORLD WAR II AND THE EXPERIENCE OF DISABILITY

  During World War II, those on the home front expected to be asked to sacrifice. They grew their own food, ate meatless meals, did without silk, recycled tin, often moved into new fields of employment, sent letters and care packages to soldiers they loved, and mourned those who died. Industry and the federal government worked together to staff the ever-growing wartime industrial needs. The African American community, whose young men went off to war, questioned how they could be asked to give lives in sacrifice while being allowed only limited and segregated access to wartime industrial employment and civil rights. Able-bodied white women wondered the same.

  World War II had profound impact on the disabled community as a whole. Even though wartime federal policies were ostensibly designed to meet labor needs, they sometimes had the ironic consequence of driving people with disabilities away from the workplace—regardless of race or sex. Simultaneously, however, other government and industrial policies encouraged the employment of people with disabilities in order to meet the wartime crisis demands. And like other wars before it, World War II expanded the ranks of Americans with disabilities.

  In October 1942, as Germany began the assault on Stalingrad and US troops landed on Guadalcanal, Bay Crockett, of Pueblo, Colorado, sought help from President Roosevelt. Crockett, who had broken his back in 1918, used crutches, and could not walk for more than a block, supported his wife and child and had done so for quite a while. His success as a provider, which understandably made him proud, required a car. What could he do, he asked his president, when his work travel required more gas-rationing coupons than he had? Like many others with mobility disabilities, he feared losing his job as an unexpected result of World War II’s tire and gasoline rationing. How could he, who could not walk to work, continue to support his wife and child? Could he and others in similar circumstances have extra gas allowance?31

  Victor Lee of Los Altos, California, similarly asked, “What is to happen to the invalid under the tire rationing program?” Trains, buses, and streetcars, he knew, were not accessible. “It seems to me,” he went on, “that in authentic cases of invalidism certified by a registered physician an exception might be made to permit the purchase of tires for cars owned by such persons. No great amount of new rubber would be involved in making life at least endurable for such people whose pleasures are at best few.”32

  After being sent back and forth between local and state appeal boards several times in her efforts to acquire new car tires, Julia O’Brien also wrote to FDR’s office, with great frustration. She appealed to FDR because, as she put it, “you know what it means to have your wings clipped.” Due to polio at age five, O’Brien was unable to walk. For over twenty-one years she had taught English and chaired the English Department at a local school, leading “a busy, active life.” “This would not be possible,” she wrote, “if I couldn’t get around in a car.” In fall 1942 her tires had already traveled over forty thousand miles. She feared that any day her tires would “blow” and that she would have “no redress.” It infuriated her that during her appeals process each of her requests had been denied and a clerk had glibly given her “some platudinous remarks about the need for sacrifice in time of war.”33

  “Sacrifice,” she proclaimed, “I think I know the meaning of the word! For twenty-eight years I have met the competition in my field and naturally had never asked nor received special consideration because of my lameness.” In a later letter, after again being denied an additional tire ration, she wrote, “As I start the new school year, I rather envy the defense workers to whom the rationing boards are so rational. This is truly a man’s world; and we women can be pardoned for saying, ‘What a mess they are making of it!’”34

  When employment was needed and encouraged, wartime rationing policies hindered people with disabilities from continuing in the employment that sustained their households and contributed to their communities. How many people were affected is unclear. Government employment programs, public and private relief agencies, and the general public—even when faced with direct contrary evidence—tended to assume that people with disabilities did not and could not work for wages. These policies that resulted in discouraging people with disabilities from employment existed simultaneously with federal and industrial efforts to bring people with disabilities into the wage workforce—again, built on the erroneous assumption that people with disabilities were not already working for wages.

  During World War II, however, “when an exceptional demand for labor arose, there was a significant increase in the employment of disabled workers who compiled impressive records of productivity.” As men and women left private employment for government and military service during the war, and as wartime industrial needs expanded exponentially, government agencies began to encourage the employment of people with disabilities. Government employment-agency placement of people with disabilities “rose from 28,000 in 1940 to 300,000 in 1945”; between 1940 and 1950, placements numbered almost 2 million.35 Private agencies joined the effort as well.

  As early as 1942, the Society for Crippled Children of Cleveland, Ohio (which later became Easter Seals), encouraged using “the physically disabled” as “an important source of labor supply for the all-out war effort.” Its Cleveland Placement Bureau, the society went on, was already placing “eight out of every ten seriously handicapped men and women” in “useful jobs in industry.” Before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the society admitted, its employment placement programs had generally been considered “community services for the disabled.” After Pearl Harbor, however, the efforts met the patriotic and wartime needs of the nation. Employment placement programs for people with disabilities had much larger meaning. “Handicapped men and women,” the article explained, “must be prepared to take the places of those called for active military service. They must be trained to fill the many new jobs in the factories turning out the planes, tanks, and guns needed for Democracy and Freedom.”36 The nation needed its disabled citizens.

  The Cleveland Placement Bureau touted the case of John Millard. Millard, it was explained, “had not been able to find a job in industry for eight years because no concern seemed interested in hiring a man with two artificial legs.” A local employer hired Millard in an assembly line at the recommendation of the bureau. He proved such “an efficient workman” that “five other handicapped persons have been added to this department.” For Millard, with a wife and six children, the job must have been both a relief and a thrill. Other success stories included “a girl with a back deformity” who stood out as “one of the outstanding workers in a large factory producing signal equipment for the Navy.” A man “with both hands deformed since birth” tested metals for Army transport trucks, and “a boy on crutches” drafted plane plans.37

  For many people with disabilities, wartime employment provided great pride, national service in the midst of a national crisis, and a solid and reliable income. May Curtis, a deaf alumnus of Gallaudet College, worked both on the fuselages of B-29s and as a typist for the Pentagon. When interviewed by contemporary blind activist and poet Kathi Wolf, she proclaimed, “It’s not in the history books, but I’m the deaf Rosie!”38

  The many Rosie the Riveters, as the women working in industrial plants were known, and all of those who worked in wartime industry, deserved to be proud of their wartime service. Wartime industrial work was dangerous, resulting in injuries, disability, and death. As historian Andrew Kersten has shown, “during the first few years of the Second World War, it was safer for Americans to be on the battlefront than it was for them to work on the home front in the arsenal of democracy.” Industrial accidents were not new, and in the nineteenth century the US industrial accident rate beat that of other industrial countries, but as wa
r hit and industry sped up, accident rates rose even further.39 Worker carelessness often received the blame, and newly disabled citizens did not bask in the heroic adulation reserved for disabled veterans. More historical research needs to be done, but it is likely that when employees with disabilities had accidents they and their disabilities received the blame.

  Just as previous wars had furthered public discussion about the employment, assistance needs, gender roles, and rights of disabled citizens, so did World War II. After World War I, Congress had passed legislation providing vocational training for disabled veterans. In 1920 the Smith-Fess Act established similar vocational training programs for disabled civilians. The Barden-LaFollette Act of 1943 expanded these efforts substantially, providing manual vocational training, higher-education opportunities, and physical rehabilitation services.40

  Underlying the creation of such programs, and postwar educational and employment policies in general, were debates about the role of government and citizenship rights. Were people with disabilities entitled to employment? Was disability a question of charity? Could employers restrict employees based on disability, race, and sex? What obligation did the nation have toward creating and guaranteeing its citizens equal access to education, housing, and/or employment? In 1944 Great Britain adopted a quota policy, in which employers with more than twenty employees were required to have a workforce of which at least 3 percent were people with disabilities. This idea was never broached seriously in the United States. In the early 1940s, when some in Congress attempted to pass legislation prohibiting employment discrimination against people with disabilities, the idea was quickly shot down.41

  Paul Strachan and the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH), a cross-disability activist organization, pushed the argument that people with disabilities had civil rights that included access to employment, education, and all of society. From today’s perspective, and at first glance, it is easy to dismiss Strachan’s views as simplistic. He tends to be remembered as the father of the National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week, signed into existence by President Truman in 1945.

  Strachan, however, understood disability as a rights issue—not one of social welfare or the individual. Rather than focusing on individuals and their emotional and physical “adjustment” to disability (which the emerging rehabilitation profession did), he urged policies and programs that focused on social structures and the ways in which they excluded people with disabilities. Disability, he argued, was a class and labor issue. Economic security—either through employment or a reliable pension program for those unable to work—was vital. For example, he urged that people with disabilities be given low-cost loans for educational and housing purposes, just as veterans had received, so that they might live independently. He urged an employment quota program, a form of affirmative action for people with disabilities, as Britain had adopted.42

  In 1940 Strachan used his experiences as a labor organizer to found the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH), the first national cross-disability activist organization. Though active in the Deaf community (and despite the opposition of some in Deaf activist organizations), Strachan insisted that the AFPH embrace people with a variety of disabilities—“the blind, deaf, hard-of-hearing, those with cardiac conditions, those with tuberculosis, arthritics, epileptics, those with poliomyelitis, those with cerebral palsy, amputees, and diabetics.” “WHY, oh WHY,” Strachan asked, “is it that there still exists this unreasoning, unjust prejudice against millions of Handicapped people? Why cannot Industry, and the public, generally, realize that we, too, aspire to the comforts, the feeling of security that comes from fair recognition of our rights, as citizens, and our needs, as Handicapped?” As historian Audra Jennings characterizes it, “the AFPH saw unemployment and economic insecurity brought on by discrimination hiring practices and a piecemeal, disorganized federal-state disability program as the core problems faced by people with disabilities.” Much of its funding came from labor unions, which knew that disability was an issue for US workers. The organization also urged building accessibility policies, and better prevention of disability through better worker safety and public health. Just as importantly, its members enjoyed each other’s company at picnics, sporting events, card parties, and even in marriages. By 1946 the AFHP had groups in eighty-nine cities.43

  Strachan’s campaigns exemplify the ways in which disability and labor activism intersected in the post–World War II period. Strachan, the AFPH, the Department of Labor, and organized labor worked together to advocate federal disability policies that stressed secure wage employment as the best means to guarantee quality of life for people with disabilities and their families. They argued against medical rehabilitation and needs-based charity services that focused exclusively on altering the individual, rather than altering social and employer attitudes. They also argued that the Department of Labor understood employment issues and the job market far better than the Federal Security Administration.

  In this political context, organized labor and disability activists worked together to bring about federal government programs pertaining to those with disabilities, including the National Employment of the Physically Handicapped Week, centered in the Department of Labor. Instead, the Federal Security Administration oversaw the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation. It had no formal job placement program and a relatively low employment success rate, was accused of rejecting those considered too disabled, and the myriad tests it used to determine eligibility (“from psychiatric evaluations to venereal disease scans to collections of life histories”) left many to consider it charity.44 Union monies, lobbying, and individuals supported Strachan and the AFPH. So did much of the Department of Labor and activist veterans. Indeed, increasingly they used the language of rights, discrimination, prejudice, and citizenship to argue that wage employment was a right—and key to securing the lives of people with disabilities.

  For example, in 1946 Major General Graves B. Erskine, formerly commander of the US Marines at Iwo Jima, and by then employed at the Department of Labor, and Secretary of Labor Leslie Schwellenbach, joined cause with Strachan. Erskine pointed out that 83 percent of industries had employed people with disabilities during the war, with “a smaller labor turnover among these workers, less absenteeism, and equal or higher production rates.” Now, those disabled “from the war and those from war industry” were being forgotten, and “there is a very noticeable tendency to slight the disabled worker in favor of the worker with no disability.” Not only that, he went on, but during June of that year, the current rehabilitation employment services had placed only one out of every twenty-one disabled veterans in secure employment. Schwellenbach called attention to the 250,000 unemployed disabled veterans. “Many of these men,” he said, “are the bravest of the brave. That they should suffer from discrimination or selfishness on the part of the employers is the rankest injustice. Labor, industry, and every private citizen must be made aware of the sorry facts and figures.”45

  In 1952 Strachan resigned from the President’s Committee that sponsored the National Employment of the Physically Handicapped Week. He’d had enough. The committee, he wrote in frustration, “was filling up . . . with a lot of ‘do-gooders, social welfare workers, and the like,’ most of whom, we, the Handicapped, know, from bitter experience, ‘WILL DO ANYTHING IN THE WORLD FOR THE HANDICAPPED, EXCEPT, GET OFF OUR BACKS!’” Despite the continued efforts of the AFPH and organized labor, a medical-based approach to disability continued to dominate federal policies and programs. The FSA and then later the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare had control of disability services—not the Department of Labor.46

  Another group promoting a departure from understanding disability as a personal and physical tragedy in the period following World War II was the Blind Veterans Association. Approximately fourteen hundred servicemen were blinded during the war, either due to combat, disease, or accident. The BVA was founded in 1945, largely by blind veter
ans who had shared experiences of hospitalization and rehabilitation programs. Like the AFPH, the organization advocated for better rehabilitation and employment programs, involvement and the leadership of blind people in such programs, and better physical accessibility. Russell Williams, one of the BVA founders, went on to establish one of the most rigorous mobility and independent-living training programs for blind people to that date. While in general blind veterans “had fewer interactions with blind people and more sighted friends than did the civil blind of their generation,” and often rejected use of a white cane in favor of the arm of their sighted wives, the BVA and the rehabilitation program organized by Williams at the Hines, Illinois, Veterans Administration hospital encouraged mobility independence, use of a white cane, and employment.47 Like the AFPH, the BVA used the language of discrimination and rights.

  The BVA encouraged the solidarity of all blind veterans, and this made it unique. The largest veterans’ organizations of the period—such as the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Disabled American Veterans—either excluded African American members or encouraged separate racially segregated chapters. In direct contrast, the Blind Veterans Association explicitly welcomed both black and Jewish veterans and spoke against racism and anti-Semitism. And when African American veteran Isaac Woodard was brutally attacked and blinded by white police officers as he headed home through South Carolina, still wearing his military uniform after being discharged with medals, the BVA raised funds on his behalf.