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Chapter 2

From the Depths of Personal Experience: Disability Activists Demand a Hearing

In 1946, at congressional hearings demanded by the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH), Margaret Nickerson Martin, a national vice president of the organization, argued that the AFPH platform represented “a sincere endeavor by handicapped people to raise the level of their own group to that of ‘people.’” She lamented the common inclination to assume people who did not “have their full quota of physical equipment” were “mentally disabled, or at least incapable.” Martin placed this desire for the recognition of disabled individuals’ personhood in a longer history. Arguing that while society no longer killed disabled people, she asserted that Americans—and American governance—did so figuratively. “But we do forget them, willfully,” Martin claimed. “We burn them at the stake of public opinion when we throw the stigma of charity at them and expect them to smile and thank us for it.” She described the “wasted existence” of individuals whose disabilities prevented any independence in the existing legal and social framework and individuals “thrown upon the unwilling care of relatives” or institutionalized and who lacked real control over their lives, bodies, and choices. She argued that the AFPH agenda could allow these individuals to bring “real worth and value to society.”¹

Martin testified before the House of Representatives Subcommittee to Investigate Aid to the Physically Handicapped, a subcommittee of the Committee on Labor. The two-year investigation sought, as its chair Augustine B. Kelley (D-PA) put it, to determine the scope of disability in the United States, where disabled Americans lived, how best “to group and classify” them, the causes of various disabilities and “the means to cure or alleviate them,” best practices in education and job training for people with disabilities, and “an over-all program for assistance to this enormous segment of our population.”² The AFPH had fought for the subcommittee as an opportunity for disabled individuals to share their “own story.” Just days before the investigation began in late August 1944, Paul Strachan told AFPH members at the organization’s second biennial convention, “we will tell our own story, and we will tell it from the depths of our personal experience with our afflictions and with the difficulties we have encountered in meeting the problems of economic life, and participating, if we could, on equal footing with the nonhandicapped.”³ The investigation represented the AFPH’s first victory in Congress. Over the course of two years, the subcommittee amassed a substantial record of the problems people with disabilities encountered and the types of federal, state, and local aid they received. It interviewed disability activists, employers, government officials, physicians, social workers, and labor leaders and collected thousands of pages of testimony.⁴

Through the AFPH, members developed and articulated, at these hearings, a critique of the ways that the American state and American society privileged able bodies and excluded disabled ones. By insisting that Congress listen to their stories and the organization’s agenda, AFPH members transformed personal experiences into political action. As Martin’s testimony suggests, the AFPH argued that federal policy, or the lack of coordinated federal policy, prevented disabled individuals from controlling their lives, their bodies, and their destinies, from making contributions to society, and from being recognized as full citizens. Martin, like many activists in the AFPH, demanded recognition of much more than the humanity of people with physical disabilities. In framing the AFPH’s proposals for federal action as an attempt to elevate the status of physically disabled individuals “to that of ‘people,’” she sought a place for disabled individuals as citizens and contributing members of the national body.⁵

Through the AFPH, disability activists came to the realization that the shared challenges that prevented their full participation in the economic and civic life of the nation extended beyond the personal and were changeable—essentially, that the meaning, privileges, and exclusions tied to (dis)ability were not fixed. Activists drew links to other social movements that had shown identities to be more fluid. For example, Martin reminded congressmen of their colleague who had recently said “brains had no sex.” She argued, “Well, neither have they physical attributes which inhibit them because their owner happens to sit in a wheelchair.” She claimed, “In the past humanity has been roughly divided into classes or categories: people, women, idiots, and the handicapped—in that order.” For Martin, society had begun to rethink the position of women and people of color, and it was now “the handicap’s [sic] turn.”⁶ By drawing connections between disability, gender, and race, Martin tied disability to broader social change and emphasized that the realities people with disabilities faced could be changed.

In 1944, the year the congressional investigation on aid to the physically handicapped began, President Roosevelt argued in his State of the Union address that Americans had “accepted as self-evident” a new series of rights, among them “the right to a useful and remunerative job,” “the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation,” “the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,” “the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment,” and “the right to a good education.”⁷ Roosevelt deemed these rights “a second Bill of Rights.” As the speech suggested, New Deal and wartime policy had led citizens to look increasingly to the federal government to guarantee access to opportunity. The right to earn a living, to work, and to a broadly defined sense of security emerged as an entitlement of citizenship—one that was, as scholars have shown, mitigated by race, gender, and sexuality.⁸

For people with disabilities, the war played an important role in creating a new sense that these rights were also theirs to claim. The House investigation and national news coverage of the home front shone a light on disability employment practices during the war. Wartime employment opportunities helped to ignite disability rights activism and the AFPH. Hiring practices that aimed to cope with labor shortages and make space for disabled veterans, along with the state’s efforts to encourage and facilitate those practices, created a new sense of what was possible. World War II policy and employment realities suggested the state could make the New Deal promise and protections of Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights accessible to Americans with disabilities. Numerous federal agencies worked with employers across the country to create new opportunities and find new ways to utilize the skills of people with disabilities. Those efforts, the jobs that grew out of them, and the meaning invested in those jobs created a new sense of rights. The AFPH grew out of and channeled those new expectations.

But even with wartime employment opportunities, those rights remained an unrealized promise for many people with disabilities. As AFPH members would work to demonstrate to the subcommittee, the patchwork of state and federal laws designed to improve the status of disabled Americans left large gaps of discrimination and need. Even as the New Deal and World War II fundamentally altered Americans’ expectations for the federal government, people with disabilities remained on the margins, underserved and classed as dependents. Through their interactions with the subcommittee, AFPH members sought to demonstrate how people with disabilities had been excluded from the promises of employment, security, and opportunity.

New Deal policy had tied access to security and the rights of citizenship to work.⁹ In this context, disabled people’s ability and right to work became central to AFPH arguments for inclusion and demands for state action. Access to work and state support of that access cut across much of the AFPH agenda. Work could secure for members greater access to economic security and health care. Improved access to education, expanded rehabilitation services, medical treatments, and physical spaces could mean greater employability. The emphasis on productive capacity and work stood in direct opposition to charity. Indeed, Martin linked charity to stigma and a figurative death. In essence, people with disabilities had become objects of charity because they were assumed to be unable to work without assistance. The connection reified the notion that people with disabilities were not citizens. Instead, charity marked people with disabilities as others, whose bodies prevented them from contributing to the national body. As AFPH members translated their personal frustrations and those of their fellow members into an agenda, a social movement, they demanded that the state recognize and facilitate their full citizenship by supporting their access to employment, rather than consigning them to charity—a prospect they viewed as dehumanizing. The realities of discrimination, economic marginalization, and failing policy would both foster and shape the AFPH and disability activism more broadly in the mid-twentieth century.

In the Context of War

The AFPH grew rapidly as people with disabilities sought opportunities to contribute to the war efforts on the home front, participate in the prosperity fueled by the war economy, and claim rights from the state as it sought their service in meeting the production needs of war. Between August 1942 and May 1945, the organization grew from the small, committed group who founded it and secured a charter to an organization with around 2,000 dues-paying members. The AFPH had established some sixty chapters and recruited members in every state before the war ended.¹⁰

As Martin’s testimony suggests, the AFPH represented people with physical disabilities. The distinction helped to define the movement’s strategies, claims, and goals, and perhaps limited its transformative potential. In arguing for people with physical disabilities’ working and citizenship capacity, members often highlighted their abilities in comparison to people with intellectual disabilities. In so doing, they defined their citizenship claims in opposition to people with intellectual and cognitive disabilities, implying that the exclusion of one group was unjust and the other just. Historian Douglas C. Baynton maintains, “When categories of citizenship were questioned, challenged, and disrupted, disability was called on to clarify and define who deserved, and who was deservedly excluded from, citizenship.”¹¹ AFPH members did not fully challenge a system of exclusion based on disability. Instead, they challenged a system of exclusion based on physical disability.

In 1944, Strachan told members that organization was the key to progress for people with disabilities and countering the “political indifference and ignorance on the part of the great mass of people.” He warned against focusing too much attention on local issues. Organizations of people with disabilities, he argued, floundered when “they persist in seeing things only in their immediate neighborhood; they persist in thinking entirely in terms of local problems; we must think in terms of the Nation.”¹² As Strachan’s speech suggests, the AFPH’s developing agenda sought to position disability as a national problem—no longer a problem solely of families, communities, charities, and local and state governments but one of national significance requiring federal action.

Organizationally, the AFPH drew on that message of the importance of national politics, tapped into existing, local networks of people with disabilities, and worked to broaden and politicize those networks. For example, participants in a swimming class for disabled men and women at the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Young Women’s Christian Association had formed a club, the Keystone Arrow Club, in the spring of 1941. In May 1943, a national AFPH officer attended a club meeting, and the group that had begun around a swimming class voted to become an AFPH chapter. The national AFPH’s presence at that May 1943 meeting drew George Lehr, Jr., to the event. Lehr, a disabled veteran of World War I, served as personnel director of Pennsylvania’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles, and through his status as a disabled veteran, his involvement in the new Harrisburg AFPH chapter would expand the group’s organizational reach to include disabled veterans and government networks.¹³

In other cases, the AFPH offered a national network for local disability organizations already politically and economically engaged. Harold J. McMahon of Buffalo, New York, would become a national vice president of the AFPH, but his organizational work in Buffalo, before and after the AFPH was founded, had primed the city’s residents to be active members in a national movement. McMahon’s personal experiences shaped his work in Buffalo. As a young man he had developed osteomyelitis, a bone infection, and lost his left leg above the knee and a bone in his left arm; he also nearly lost his right leg. After recovering, McMahon worked in the printing trade, holding numerous positions from work in the composing room to sales. During World War I, he worked in a war plant outside of New York City. McMahon convinced his employer that other people with disabilities could meet the factory’s labor demands, and the factory eventually hired sixty disabled workers. After the war, McMahon returned to the printing industry. A few years later, however, he visited the plant where he had worked during the war to discover that all the disabled folks he had worked with there had “been discarded and replaced by able-bodied people.” That experience stuck with McMahon, but another sharpened the feeling that he had to do something to improve the opportunities for people with disabilities. He recalled seeing a bread line in Philadelphia in 1930 and realizing that nine of the thirty people in line had visible disabilities. That breadline, he later said, represented a truth he had known for some time: “the handicapped worker is always the last hired and the first fired.” McMahon decided that freedom from charity and public aid would come through organization of businesses owned by people with disabilities.¹⁴

Even as defense industries expanded and industry faced labor shortages, McMahon moved forward with his plan to establish a factory managed and run by disabled people, noting “I could not help but believe that these handicapped boys and girls who had been hired in defense plants would be the first to be dismissed as soon as war production ceases.” He also recognized that many disabled people remained unemployed even as factories were desperate for workers. The war economy presented both challenges and opportunities for McMahon’s idea. Regulations designed to increase defense production limited available materials for consumer goods, but because many factories had shifted from consumer to defense production, there was an opening in the market. In the summer of 1942, he launched the Toymakers Guild, a division of his broader company, Handicapped Persons Industries, Inc., to produce wooden toys. McMahon recruited other successful disabled individuals to serve on the board, ranging from teachers to a master watchmaker, a housewife, and a defense worker. The group designed toys, produced samples, and secured $100,000 in orders at a toy fair in New York City.¹⁵

McMahon and the board of Handicapped Persons Industries, Inc., employed individuals from the relief rolls, all deemed not feasible for rehabilitation by the civilian rehabilitation program. The first twenty-one people he hired had spent a combined total of 125 years existing on meager public aid and private charity. Handicapped Persons Industries, Inc., paid workers full wages, despite the fact that the Fair Labor Standards Act allowed employers to pay people with disabilities less than the minimum wage. McMahon also ensured that his employees had access to Social Security benefits and were paid time and a half for overtime work.¹⁶ Through Handicapped Persons Industries, Inc., and McMahon’s organizing efforts, Buffalo’s disabled citizens had already begun to demand something more than charity, and the AFPH’s message of justice, opportunity, and equal rights found an eager constituency.

By the end of 1942, the AFPH’s national campaign for legislation was underway. In June 1942, Representative Jerry Voorhis (D-CA) had introduced a joint resolution to establish National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week (NEPHW), Strachan’s plan for a formal public education campaign.¹⁷ The AFPH had also begun the drive for a federal investigation of the needs of Americans with disabilities and the aid programs that benefitted them. Voorhis told AFPH members that such a committee “would be the means of focusing public attention” on the problems people with disabilities faced, reveal their needs, and contribute to “the formulation of a national policy.” Additionally, the organization had begun to develop plans for a federal agency for disabled individuals, a federal ban on employment discrimination, representation in government agencies serving people with disabilities, and mandates for special services through the U.S. Civil Service Commission and U.S. Employment Service.¹⁸ By 1944, the AFPH had found sponsors for four different bills. In the House, the AFPH got two different bills introduced: one, instructing the Committee on Labor to “investigate, survey, and develop a national program for all the physically handicapped,” and another that would have established a personal catastrophe loan system. The organization succeeded in finding sponsors in both the House and Senate for bills to establish NEPHW and to create a division in the Employment Service for disabled job seekers.¹⁹

The House of Representatives voted to launch the AFPH proposed investigation in June 1944. The resolution directed the Committee on Labor “to conduct thorough studies and investigation of the extent and character of aid now given by the Federal, State, and local governments and private agencies to the physically handicapped” and “employment opportunities” to “aid the Congress in any necessary remedial legislation.” It gave the committee and any subcommittees it formed the power to subpoena records, hold hearings, compel testimony, and access Selective Service System, War Manpower Commission, and Bureau of the Census records.²⁰

As chair of the Committee on Rules, Representative Adolph Sabath D-IL) introduced the measure for consideration, noting his support and that he had “received a very large number of communications, telegrams, and resolutions from nearly every section of the United States favoring the passage of this worthy resolution.” While promoted by Democrats, Republicans, including the minority leader Joseph Martin (R-MA), also expressed approval. The AFPH figured in the discussion on the House floor. Henderson Carson (R-OH) contended, “It is imperative that we immediately plan a national program to provide a cushion against the unhappy days of post-war chaos and possible unemployment and want which a large number of these people have experienced in the past.” He noted that people with disabilities “are patriotic in the extreme,” having committed “to all war activities.” Carson’s words were shaped by his personal connection to the AFPH. He was an honorary member of the organization and knew one of the national vice presidents well, both hailing from Canton, Ohio.²¹

Committee on Labor member Richard J. Welch (R-CA) argued that the investigation would focus on “the human rights of physically handicapped individuals” and that Congress “should give them fair consideration.” Representative Kelley, who would chair the committee, said that Congress confronted “an astonishing lack of knowledge” on the problems that contributed to the unemployment of people with disabilities. Without an investigation, he maintained, Congress would not have the information necessary “to deal with the problem.” Beyond the question of rights, members of the House repeatedly referenced labor shortages and the need to assist disabled veterans, as Jennings Randolph (D-WV) phrased it, “fit themselves into our peacetime day-by-day economy.”²²

The House Committee on Labor established a subcommittee to conduct the investigation, which lasted from August 1944 until June 1946. In 1944, Randolph, Welch, Thomas E. Scanlon (D-PA), Stephen A. Day (R-IL), and Joseph Clark Baldwin (R-NY) formed the subcommittee with Kelley serving as the chair. After the 1944 election, the subcommittee grew to seven members, and Ellis E. Patterson (D-CA), William J. Green, Jr. (D-PA), and Sherman Adams (R-NH) replaced Scanlon and Day. The subcommittee conducted twenty-five hearings, focusing on aid to amputees; blind, deaf, and “spastic” individuals; as well as people with poliomyelitis, tuberculosis, orthopedic disabilities, cancer, and epilepsy. The hearings examined conditions in New York City, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Philadelphia and studied disability through the lenses of accident prevention, monopolies and advertising, international activities, Library of Congress programs, drug addiction, employment, federal aid, rural conditions, coordination of federal programs, federal employment for blind individuals, and maternal and child health. The subcommittee also held hearings on the AFPH’s proposed federal agency.²³

When Personal Became Political

Through the AFPH, the mosaic of members’ individual struggles to access health care, education, rehabilitation services, employment, and a broad range of physical spaces formed a broader picture of state and social failures. Members who lacked familial or community support existed on the margins of society and faced the threat of being placed in institutions. All these factors led to chronic fears, and regular experiences, of economic insecurity. By demanding a federal investigation and sharing their stories, members transformed their personal experiences of discrimination, exclusion, and frustration with a lack of services into a collective, political statement.

Civilian rehabilitation policy was central to the critique offered by AFPH members. In many ways, it came to represent a broad range of social and economic problems people with disabilities often faced and the failures of government policy to address these issues. Like many AFPH members, McMahon had been deemed a poor candidate for rehabilitation because his disability was too severe when he sought assistance in the 1920s. His own experiences, and those of other disabled members of the Buffalo community, many of whom worked with or for him at Handicapped Persons Industries, Inc., led him to conclude, “Entirely too many physically handicapped individuals are being considered not feasible for rehabilitation.” One of his secretaries, who had “a progressive paralysis,” had been denied rehabilitation, and when the counselor who had rejected her visited her home a year later, he did not believe her mother’s report that she was working. Like his secretary, more than half McMahon’s employees had been refused rehabilitation. Through his own business and connections in the community, McMahon tried to demonstrate that the rehabilitation program rejected many people who could be successful workers. He hired thirty-three workers with disabilities and placed another fifteen with other firms in just one year.²⁴

AFPH member Edith Povar of Dorchester, Massachusetts, wrote to Strachan, asking him to share her experience with rehabilitation with the subcommittee. She concluded that the program was all “politics and red tape.” Povar wrote, “They said I had the mental ability to hold a position but because I was a spastic they could not help me.” Having a form of cerebral palsy, despite being “able to get about well” and not having impaired speech, meant that rehabilitation counselors deemed her not feasible for the program.²⁵ Warren D. Wright of Rockwell City, Iowa, had a similar experience of being too “seriously handicapped” for rehabilitation. He wrote the subcommittee that “for every person they are able to help in any way, there are many more for whom they can do nothing.” In rehabilitation, Wright saw a stymied path to the opportunities “most of us are interested in—to be able to be more independent from our family, and to work out some method of making our own living, not to mention medical aid, or better health.”²⁶

Beyond the rejections, McMahon complained that rehabilitation officials in Buffalo refused to work with other agencies and were out of touch with the realities people with disabilities faced in the community. McMahon reported being “astounded” by a wartime press release from the head of the Buffalo rehabilitation office, which claimed that, if one thousand disabled individuals came to the office for rehabilitation the next day, he could place them in jobs. For McMahon, the announcement was startling because the Erie County Welfare Council and the Employment Service had a backlog of disabled job seekers and the rehabilitation director had not taken “the time to call either one of these other two agencies.” Further, he claimed that the rehabilitation program directly undermined the work of the Employment Service as some employers had been led to believe that they should not hire disabled individuals through the Employment Service unless the rehabilitation program approved the applicant.²⁷

Other AFPH members complained about the “superior and patronizing attitude” of rehabilitation counselors, who, they believed, understood little about the labor market, job training, or job placement. “There is a tendency,” Margaret Nickerson Martin argued, “of certain groups working with handicapped people to feel that their exposure to the upper brackets of learning, their attainment of certain educational set standards, entitles them to a private halo, which they wear very straight upon their heads.” J. A. Strohmeyer, a national vice president and leader in the AFPH in Chicago, suggested that the individuals involved in the rehabilitation program were “more interested in gratuities and cheap publicity for themselves than for common-sense aid to the physically handicapped.”²⁸

Rehabilitation counselors made judgments about the possibilities and fitness of the individual to work. Rejection meant that the counselor deemed the individual unfit for work and that reasonable educational, medical, and vocational help would not make the person employable. The gap between the number of cases registered and the number of individuals rehabilitated was wide. In 1944, the first year of the investigation, the civilian rehabilitation program registered 269,960 cases but rehabilitated only 43,997 persons, only 16 percent of those who applied.²⁹ These figures indicate, at least in part, that the very agency charged with preparing and placing people with disabilities in employment found employment potential in only a small percentage of the disabled individuals it encountered.

Rejection meant that the sole federal agency that served disabled people’s interests had deemed them unemployable, cutting them off from the resources that might have improved their employability and access to social resources and civic life. Rejection from rehabilitation equaled rejection from the opportunity to secure the full rights and benefits of citizenship, let alone any sense of economic security. Pauline Solomon, who served as financial secretary of one of the Washington, D.C., AFPH chapters, described people with disabilities as being “unfairly condemned to a life of idleness and despair because of injury or disease which we do not have the means to remedy.”³⁰

Rejection from rehabilitation often spelled dependence on charity or family, or even institutionalization. A disabled resident of Whitinsville, Massachusetts, wrote, “It is unfair that we should be the responsibility of charitable organizations and the burdens of relatives or family however willing or able they are to stand the financial strain which is always great to all but the very rich.” A disabled person who was rejected from rehabilitation “does not want or expect his or her family to give up comforts or convenience that should normally be their’s [sic] to give them to him. A person cannot feel anything but a burden under such circumstances.”³¹

The vocational rehabilitation program provided the only broad-based form of aid for adults with disabilities, but families played an integral role in closing the gaps in social services. Families provided not only the first defense against poverty and need but also the safety net when the rehabilitation program failed people with disabilities. The absence of family resources could spell disaster for a person with a disability. The failures of the rehabilitation service and welfare policy cemented disabled people’s dependent status. George Booth wrote, “I was refused any public assistance other than the county home for the poor.” At sixteen, he began work in the mines, but he fractured his pelvis in an automobile accident. After nearly two years in the hospital, Booth continued to use a crutch for mobility. His mother died during the Depression, leaving his aging father to support him and three young children. Booth tried to work and helped care for his younger brothers, but his father struggled to make ends meet on a public works project wage. Booth applied for relief because he was unemployed, but he was told that “if my father refused to keep me I should sue him for nonsupport.” The response from relief officials made clear that Booth, who was in his twenties at the time, was regarded as a dependent. His disability negated his previous working history and blocked him from accessing the protections against uncertainty that the New Deal had created.³²

The gaps in New Deal protections also shaped Mildred Willis’s life. Living in Otwell, Indiana, Willis depended on her sixty-one-year-old father for support. At forty, she had “been bedfast 23 years with tuberculosis of the bone.” Her father’s ill health prevented him from working on a regular basis, and the cost of her care, which required dressing her hip each day, was becoming a greater burden on the family. Willis’s father did not yet qualify for Social Security, and the program did not yet provide financial assistance to people with disabilities beyond Aid to the Blind. Willis eked out an existence selling greeting cards, but she reported growing difficulties in making ends meet as more organizations sold cards and others could be purchased at stores. She described others in her situation who were able to get bedding or other minor assistance from a charity organization, but Willis wrote that they needed “other things just as bad and all the time.”³³

The availability of family resources and willingness to expend them on a disabled relative could mean the difference between living in an institution and receiving an education, between confinement and mobility. Children with physical disabilities, without family support, might have been institutionalized in state or county homes for the “feebleminded” or aged. Adults with disabilities who were unable to secure employment and without family support also feared being institutionalized. Susan Polk Graves of St. Louis, Missouri, wrote the subcommittee that she was “handicapped by spastic paralysis to the extent that I cannot even sign my own name, dress, or feed myself; I do not walk alone, either.” She described the “dreadful situation” common when a person, like her, with cerebral palsy, “is left alone in the world or for some reason cannot be cared for in his own home, he is sent to State institutions for the feeble-minded, regardless of his intelligence.”³⁴ Ultimately, without family support or the assistance of rehabilitation or charities, the economic marginalization of people with disabilities could end in their institutionalization—a dreaded fate.

Members’ testimony emphasized that difficulties in finding employment were a critical component of their economic marginalization. For example, Charles J. Hobbins, an AFPH member from Pennsylvania, had worked for much of his life but had nearly always struggled to find employment. An accident at age twelve resulted in the amputation of his left arm at the elbow and a right arm that was “pretty badly crippled.” He reported that he had been told time and time again that workers’ compensation laws in Pennsylvania prevented employers from hiring “a crippled person.”³⁵ Likewise, Helen J. Apgar of St. Louis, Missouri, wrote to the subcommittee about the difficulties she and other disabled people faced on the job market. She had found work during the war, a job she hoped “to hold” with the transition to peace, “but during the depression,” she wrote, “I was laid off because they could have their choice of healthy and better-looking girls who were willing to work for low wages.” Apgar had fractured her back as a toddler, which resulted in “some deformity” of her spine. “The personnel heads,” she noted, “take one glance at a crippled person and say: ‘The job has been filled,’ ‘No more applications are being taken.’ Nine out of ten offices have told me that (when same firms have advertisements in the next day’s paper).” Apgar opined that if disabled people were “too ‘terrible’ to stand seeing around, then the healthy taxpayer should give them a pension to live on.” She concluded, “The poor injured returning veterans certainly have my sympathy if they meet the cool atmosphere I come up against time after time in job hunting.”³⁶ Cynthia May Lurie of Arlington, Virginia, criticized employers for their attitude toward her disability. She noted, “Some of those who interviewed me asked me if I had a warm home and plenty to eat. After telling them I did, they couldn’t understand why I wanted to work.” Still other employers, she argued, “treated me as though I was out of my mind and would rush me out of their office at the beginning of the interview.”³⁷

AFPH members and other people with disabilities who wrote to the subcommittee described experience after experience of informal, yet widespread, employment discrimination. The employers they encountered rarely explained that they were passing on an individual because of a disability, but instead rushed through interviews or told disabled applicants the position had been filled, while continuing to advertise for employees. Employers routinely blamed insurance companies for their refusal to hire people with disabilities, insisting that insurance rates would be higher if they did so or that insurance policies were unavailable for disabled workers. Insurance companies, however, claimed that employers misinterpreted their policies and were unnecessarily restrictive in their hiring policies when it came to disabled individuals. For example, one insurance company reported, “Some employers assume that physical examinations are had for the purpose of discrimination.” In reality, the company required the examinations prior to employment to protect employers from paying for existing injuries.³⁸ Whether employers or insurance companies were actually to blame, people with disabilities often heard that ineligibility for insurance or high rates prevented their employment.

Educational inequality often exacerbated the difficulties that AFPH members and other disabled Americans experienced as they searched for work. A lack of educational opportunities was central to AFPH testimony before the subcommittee and its broader developing agenda. Representing the AFPH committee of the deaf, Alan B. Crammatte pointed out that “schools for the deaf provide an elementary education or less for their students, plus a few years (3 to 7) of vocational education, for 2 to 4 hours a day, and necessarily at an elementary school level.” This level of education, Crammatte asserted, prepared deaf children “for little other than menial labor.”³⁹ AFPH leaders shared with the subcommittee a 1944 report produced by the organization’s national leadership council that emphasized widespread educational failures. The report suggested that many states had been “remiss in their scrutiny of services to handicapped children, especially in relation to school set-ups.” It noted the need for better facilities, instruction, and teachers. Of particular concern to the members who drafted the report was the fact that disabled children were often “being taught by second-rate teachers who are not—sad to relate—deemed of sufficient quality, in several instances, to teach in nonhandicapped schools.”⁴⁰

Indeed, disabled children and young adults encountered considerable barriers to obtaining an education. Before Congress enacted the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, public schools could deny children access to education based on their disabilities. Most states maintained separate, residential facilities for blind and deaf children, where they were educated away from their homes and families.⁴¹ Still, the availability of instruction through special classes or schools was woefully inadequate. In 1937, the U.S. Office of Education estimated that of the approximately two million disabled children in the country only one in every ten benefited from a special education program.⁴² Access to public or special schools for children with physical disabilities largely depended on the city and state the child lived in, the individual child’s disability, family resources and advocacy, and decisions of school administrators. For example, Melvin E. Schoonover, AFPH member and editor of the Shut-In’s Companion, wrote to other AFPH members, “The shut-in fraternity as a whole probably constitutes the largest single unit of illiterate and semi-literate persons within our national community.” He claimed that “very few” homebound people with disabilities were “able to complete even grammar school.” Schoonover concluded, “It seems foolhardy to refuse to the shut-in what is compulsorily given to others.”⁴³

While white children with disabilities encountered serious barriers to their education, the conditions African American children with disabilities faced were worse. Writing for the Journal of Negro Education in 1937, educator James A. Scott argued that blind and deaf African American children had the greatest access to education, but that even the education that these children received was “distinctly inferior.” Many southern states maintained completely separate schools for blind and deaf African American children, while others provided instruction for African American pupils in segregated classes within the states’ blind and deaf schools. Scott declared, “Practically no effort is made to enforce compulsory attendance laws for either Negro blind or deaf pupils.” Moreover, he maintained that in the South public education programs for white children with other physical disabilities were “practically non-existent,” and conditions were much worse for African American children. Finally, Scott contended that racial discrimination against African American children with disabilities also extended to some programs in the North. On the whole, racial discrimination dramatically reduced the already slim educational opportunities open to children with disabilities, and in most cases, the institutions open to African Americans suffered from chronic underfunding, with the quality of instruction falling far below what was available to white children.⁴⁴

People with disabilities also faced considerable barriers to higher education. For example, Lurie told the subcommittee that she had tried for more than a year to attend college, applying for admission to several schools. Lurie complained, “Not one of these colleges would accept me because of spastic paralysis.” At least one of the schools was direct about rejecting Lurie because of her disability. The dean, Lurie reported, thought that the school would be too crowded for her and “feared that I would not fit into the college due to the fact that all of my classmates would be physically fit and I would be the only one handicapped.”⁴⁵ As late as 1949, an effort to find a college or university to accept a group of disabled students, mostly veterans, who had been attending the temporary Galesburg campus of the University of Illinois, yielded telling results. Of the approximately 150 schools contacted, fifteen expressed a willingness to admit the students but only four could offer an accessible campus.⁴⁶

The quality and availability of prosthetic limbs and mobility aids, necessary for many people with disabilities to gain an education or employment, figured prominently in disability activists’ testimony—both on the military and civilian side. Like members of the AFPH, veterans and the organizations that represented them used the House investigation to draw attention to the difficulties that they faced. As early as 1942, the American Legion had begun a campaign to pressure the government to conduct research into better prosthetics. During the war, the Army Medical Corps alone performed successful amputations on roughly 14,000 soldiers. Amputees overwhelmed the system caring for them. Early in the war, the army provided initial treatment for its amputees who were then transferred to the VA for further care, rehabilitation, and training. By 1943, the army—soldiers suffered the bulk of injuries during the war that required amputations—had to offer definitive care for its amputees, as the VA could not handle the influx of patients. The army established special amputation centers in seven army hospitals across the country that produced limbs and provided surgical and medical care and rehabilitation. Army limbs were meant to be temporary to facilitate adjustment, while the VA would provide permanent, commercially manufactured limbs after discharge. The army struggled to meet the demand for limbs with a limited number of trained prosthetic device makers and technicians. The results were troubling to soldiers who were issued these prostheses. Moreover, once discharged, veterans relied on the VA for future prostheses, follow-up care, and maintenance, repair, and replacement of artificial limbs. Veterans applied for services at a local field station but might be referred to one of the VA’s twelve amputation centers. The VA contracted with private manufacturers to provide limbs for veterans, which typically narrowed the choices available to them. The surgeon general of the army worked with the National Research Council to launch a study of artificial limbs that resulted in the establishment of a permanent National Research Council committee on the development of better prostheses in 1945, but the effort came too late to stave critique.⁴⁷

In 1945, Lieutenant Sol Rael, who had received medical care and an artificial limb at Walter Reed General Hospital in Washington, D.C., told subcommittee members that his prosthetic was “crude and out-moded and definitely a throw-back to horse-and-buggy days.” He reported, “There was no question in my mind when I received my prosthesis that I was greatly disappointed and disillusioned in seeing what a hackneyed article it really was.”⁴⁸

Veterans expressed frustration about the utility and fit of their new limbs and the process they had to go through to get assistance from the VA. After losing a limb in an explosion in northern Africa in July 1943, Robert L. Rogers was shipped home to receive treatment at Walter Reed. His leg was amputated about five inches below the knee, but once he began walking with his prosthetic, his stump opened up. After four surgeries and over a year in Walter Reed, Rogers still had constant troubles with his leg and was waiting for a new socket and a new leather foot to give him greater function. He argued that the army’s legs were improperly fitted and made of poor quality materials—materials so cheap that a limb maker had told him his leg was not worth “two hoots in hell.”⁴⁹

For men like Rogers, who depended on their earnings to make ends meet, replacing an ill-fitting or low-quality limb with personal funds was out of the question. Taking time away from work to travel to the VA for repairs and to apply for a new limb had costs as well. The VA had determined that Rogers’s artificial leg should be repaired and not replaced; consequently, Rogers had to go to the VA repeatedly and wait. He had to wait for repairs. He had to wait for the VA to decide that he was eligible for a new limb. He even had to wait for new crutches. When his army-issued crutches broke, he went to the VA to request a new pair. Fortunately, Rogers was able to borrow a pair from the dispensary at his job as it took over two months for his VA crutches to arrive. All of the waiting had profound consequences for Rogers. He had difficulty working, shifting from job to job in hopes of finding something that would not set off the pain, and as a result, he struggled to make a living.⁵⁰

According to Rogers, disabled veterans were tired of waiting and tired of having their situation ignored. He said that the public face of army amputation centers was a farce. When they photographed men walking and dancing, he claimed, it was after only a few steps and not “after he had walked 20 steps” or after the dance when “he has hopped … into the corner or goes hopping downstairs to get his crutches.” Just as the pain made Rogers “hate to walk,” it made him, and others like him, question the government that had sent them to battle. “These derned legs,” he cried, “I do not know what is wrong, the Government is supposed to be trying to do so much for us, and they are not doing a darned thing.”⁵¹ A DAV representative told the committee that developing better artificial limbs was necessary to pay back “an undischarged war debt.”⁵²

The difficulties disabled soldiers and veterans faced with their prosthetic limbs were amplified in the civilian sector. When a member of the subcommittee asked Dr. Charles M. Griffith, medical director of the VA, how a civilian might fare in purchasing an artificial limb, he replied, “If he does not have a private doctor or an orthopedist to help him, God have mercy on him.”⁵³ Griffith described the exact situation of many civilians. Representing the AFPH committee of the amputees, Agnes Schnaus, a national vice president of the organization, reported, “As it stands, anyone can set themselves up as a maker and fitter of surgical appliances and the appliance fitter can go about his business any way he sees fit.” In these circumstances, she concluded, “there is nothing to prevent the public from being sold misfit appliances.”⁵⁴