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Introduction

In early 1943, Mildred Scott, who was in her early thirties and living in Dallas, Texas, at the time, came across a pamphlet for a new organization—the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH). Intrigued by what she had read, she wrote for more information and eventually joined the organization, whose emblem promised “Justice,” “Opportunity,” “Unity,” and “Equal Rights.” Her own experiences had taught her that people with disabilities could not expect opportunity, equal rights, or justice in the same way able-bodied individuals could. Growing up in Cecil, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, disabled by polio and one of seven children, she rarely felt “different” or “looked upon as a ‘novelty.’”¹

That changed shortly before she graduated from high school, when she learned that she would be denied the career path of the women she “knew and admired best.” Her home state, like many others, banned people with visible disabilities from teaching. Scott attended a teachers college but could not get a job as a teacher. Eventually, she landed work as a stenographer with the U.S. Bureau of Mines, a job that would ultimately take her to Dallas, but she would later say that her experience searching for “what I might do” taught her that people with disabilities needed to work for better laws and greater opportunity. Discovering that she was legally barred from following her ambitions, and experiencing what must have been a difficult search for some other path, surely made the AFPH commitment to ending “all unfair discrimination against the employment of otherwise qualified but physically handicapped applicants” particularly appealing.²

For a while, Scott did little beyond joining the fledgling organization, which by the following year already boasted forty-five lodges and an extensive at-large membership.³ As a member, however, Scott began to receive mailings from the AFPH. She grew increasingly interested in the organization that she would later describe as “pioneering in a virtually unknown field.” When she moved to Washington, D.C., after having saved money to return to school, Scott began volunteering with the AFPH in the evening, learning more about the organization, its aims, and its agenda. She decided to invest her “time and money into [the AFPH] instead.” Later, Scott recalled that she “had never met anyone before who was so convinced and determined that there must be a real program for the Nation’s millions of handicapped, and, a militant organization to back it up,” as Paul Strachan, the organization’s founder and president.⁴

A man with impressive government and union connections from his days as an organizer and legislative representative for the American Federation of Labor (AFL), Strachan had founded the AFPH to improve the economic and social lot of disabled Americans. Chartered in Washington, D.C., in 1942 as a nonprofit, educational, and beneficent organization, the AFPH grew out of Strachan’s personal experiences of being “broke and dependent” after an automobile accident and several prolonged illnesses, and his vivid memories of how disabled World War I veterans had been cast aside once the embers of war and victory celebrations had faded.⁵ Eventually, Scott’s determination and commitment grew to match Strachan’s. She began working for the AFPH full-time as the national organization’s secretary. Scott described the AFPH as full of “faith and hope,” working “for things that are right and just,” and her own activism as working toward “a program which someday would bring about better conditions for the handicapped and the members of their families.”⁶

In discovering that Pennsylvania law prevented her from fulfilling a calling toward which she had worked and for which she felt able, Mildred Scott began to understand that society imposed limits on her beyond any physical limitation associated with her disability. Disability was imbued with social consequences and meaning that extended far beyond the lasting physical, mental, or intellectual consequences of disease, accident, or birth defect. Scott’s personal experiences speak to this larger story, not just of the organization she helped to run, but of American society, law, and the state. Disability is, and has always been, evolving, defined variously by religious leaders, physicians, policymakers, philanthropists, social workers, and disabled people themselves. Scholars in the fields of disability studies and history have come to understand disability as a social construction and a powerful tool for understanding relationships of power and systems of exclusion. Disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson maintains “that disability, like femaleness, is not a natural state of corporeal inferiority, inadequacy, excess, or a stroke of misfortune. Rather, disability is a culturally fabricated narrative of the body.”⁷ In the 1940s, AFPH members, like Scott, began to recognize and confront socially constructed narratives of disability that limited their participation in the workforce and their lives as citizens.

The AFPH enabled members to look beyond individual struggles and identify a broader pattern of disability exclusions that belied narratives of individual failure and faults. More than an end to disability discrimination, AFPH leaders and members imagined a society in which state policy made possible disabled individuals’ full participation in civic life. While its demands changed over time, the AFPH sought a range of federal services to facilitate the employment of people with disabilities, advocating for greater access to government employment, employment placement assistance, and legislation requiring employers to hire people with disabilities. The organization further called for a federal pension program for people with disabilities years before Congress extended social insurance to disability or aid to people with disabilities beyond blindness, which had been written into the original Social Security Act. AFPH activists demanded improved access to health care and education, increased building access, better safety and hygiene programs, and federally funded research on various disabilities and potential treatments. Moreover, they envisioned a state in which people with disabilities participated in the development and administration of the policies that would shape their lives.⁸

As a national, cross-disability social movement organization, the AFPH represented something new. The AFPH pulled thousands of disabled citizens—civilians and veterans with a range of physical disabilities—into the national political arena, demanding equal access to economic security and its corollary, economic citizenship, where older organizations had grown around a single disability, a local community, or military service.⁹ AFPH leaders claimed that all Americans with disabilities had much in common. Indeed, AFPH chapters facilitated a more universal notion of disability as members’ interactions with one another sensitized them to the challenges of others’ disabilities. These interactions fostered a sense that disability exclusions transcended the specific type of disability or the way it was acquired and that only national activism and federal action could create a better situation. Beyond its disabled constituents, the organization won the powerful support of labor leaders in the AFL, Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), International Association of Machinists (IAM), and other unions.¹⁰

This vision had its limitations. As the organization’s name suggests, AFPH leaders and members imagined a society and state accessible to people with physical disabilities. Furthermore, members and leaders often claimed rights on the basis of their mental abilities. The distinction is significant. Historian Douglas C. Baynton has demonstrated that disability served as a powerful tool to “justify inequality” in American history. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he maintains, disability shaped arguments for slavery, against women’s suffrage, and for immigration restrictions. Essentially, these arguments pointed to socially constructed narratives of physical and mental frailties and deficiencies of African Americans, women, and certain ethnic groups to protect the institution of slavery and guard against expanding the boundaries of citizenship. Instead of challenging exclusions based on disability, he argues, social movements for greater equality have often refuted their association with disability.¹¹ When AFPH members emphasized physically disabled people’s mental ability, they reified the notion that at least some kinds of disability justified exclusion, even as they sought to create an accessible state and dismantle, or at least reframe, disability exclusions.

Disability placed AFPH members outside what historian and legal scholar Barbara Young Welke calls the “borders of belonging.” Welke argues that throughout the long nineteenth century, notions of ability and disability, alongside race and gender, infused the law “with legal consequences of inclusion and privilege or exclusion and subordination.”¹² Scholars have shown that state growth in the twentieth century both reflected and reinforced gendered, racial, and class-based hierarchies. Indeed, twentieth-century state growth expanded the systems of exclusion rather than constricting them as state efforts to police homosexuality helped to construct a “homosexual-heterosexual binary” that like gender and race would shape access to the rights of citizenship.¹³

I argue that ability and disability—the (dis)ability binary—continued to shape the ways Americans defined and codified the rights of citizenship; notions of fitness, dependency, and entitlement; and the responsibilities of the state to its citizens in the twentieth century. Mildred Scott and the AFPH more broadly encountered state policy built around the idea that disability represented a problem to be solved and disabled individuals others who needed to be excluded, contained, or aided because they could not fulfill the social and economic roles defined by their gender and class.

In the midst of dramatic economic, social, and political change of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, disability inspired and framed significant state growth.¹⁴ At the turn of the century, workplace accidents annually killed or at least temporarily disabled one worker in every fifty.¹⁵ American workplaces were the most dangerous in the industrialized world, with risk of injury, disability, and death so high as to inspire comparisons to warfare.¹⁶ The rising human toll of industry informed Progressive Era reformers’ desire to ease the plight of workers and curb the excesses of industrial capitalism. Between 1910 and 1925, all but five states adopted workers’ compensation laws that mandated financial restitution for injured workers. Historian John Fabian Witt argues that these efforts to cope with the carnage of American industry transformed the legal system with “new ideas and institutions organized around risk, security, and the actuarial categories of insurance” that would offer Americans disabled at work new rights but also frame social policy and the rise of the administrative state in the first four decades of the twentieth century.¹⁷

As the terrifying rate of industrial accidents, a new wave of immigrants, who were viewed as physically, mentally, and morally suspect, World War I, and successive polio epidemics repeatedly brought disability into focus, Americans adopted a range of strategies to address what they perceived as a growing problem. At its most grim, the response to this growing awareness of disability gave rise to policies of involuntary institutionalization and sterilization targeting individuals deemed “feebleminded,” immigration restrictions, and anti-begging ordinances that banned individuals who were “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or deformed in any way, so as to be unsightly or disgusting” from being seen in public.¹⁸

The federal government had always provided some sort of compensation to disabled veterans through “invalid” pensions, but by the early twentieth century the veteran pension system contributed to the sense of crisis around disability. By 1915, Civil War pensions cost the nation more than two hundred million dollars a year. In costs and loss of productivity, the Civil War pension system embodied what proponents of a new system would call “war’s waste.” During World War I, progressive reformers transformed the veteran pension system. With the War Risk Insurance Act of 1917, they attempted to provide financial security for disabled veterans who faced systematic discrimination in the labor market and veterans with more severe disabilities who were unable to work. Equally as important, the federal government instituted a system of medical rehabilitation, and later vocational rehabilitation, for veterans injured in combat. Through rehabilitation, reformers sought to salvage disabled men and equip them to become productive citizens once again.¹⁹

Congress extended vocational, but not medical rehabilitation, to civilians “disabled in industry or otherwise” in 1920 with the Industrial Rehabilitation Act, or Smith-Fess Act.²⁰ The administration of the civilian rehabilitation program reflected and supported a particular understanding of citizenship, belonging, and workers. Women, people of color, and people with the most severe disabilities were typically excluded, with the average rehabilitation recipient being a thirty-one-year-old white man. Moreover, the U.S. Office of Education that ran the program, designed to return disabled men to productive labor, required that rehabilitation caseworkers be “physically capable.”²¹ The desire to rehabilitate disabled individuals built on changing notions of dependency, which scholars Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon have demonstrated, grew increasingly stigmatized during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rehabilitation movement’s emphasis on work suggests that disabled dependency had also grown increasingly problematic. Work served as the defining characteristic of male citizenship, and willingness to work divided the deserving from the undeserving poor. In this framework, rehabilitationists, as historian Brad Byrom suggests, viewed disabled dependents as “the antithesis of American citizenship.”²² Finding ways to put disabled men to work would push back this unspoken challenge to American citizenship while also solving the economic problem of supporting disabled Americans.

In 1952, AFPH vice president J. Rosemond Cook, Jr., wrote that the AFPH had been born amid “the troubles and terrors” of World War II—a moment of promise and consequence for disabled people.²³ The war, I argue, made disability particularly visible to policymakers and infused it with greater consequences for the nation and a new sense of urgency. It also enabled the rise of a national, cross-disability social movement by creating a new sense of what was possible for people with disabilities.

The necessities of war brought the New Deal promise within the reach of disabled people. While recovery proved elusive during the 1930s, the New Deal, through a stunning array of legislative and executive actions, fundamentally changed Americans’ expectations of the federal government. President Franklin D. Roosevelt engaged the federal government in an unprecedented effort to provide Americans with direct relief, jobs, and longterm protection against the uncertainties of unemployment, old age, and widowhood. In 1941, he equated the health of a nation with its ability to provide: “Equality of opportunity for youth and for others. Jobs for those who can work. Security for those who need it.”²⁴

Yet during the Depression years that New Deal promise—of opportunity, work, and security—was empty for many Americans. New Dealers drew a line between those who should have the guarantee of work and those who could not or should not work, and thus receive aid, by legislating the promise of work to some and relief to others. The drawing of this line, in many respects, had little to do with the individual’s desires or citizen status and more to do with prevailing notions about the “appropriate” structure of families, men’s and women’s roles within the family, race, and class. In this dichotomy of work and relief, which political scientist Barbara J. Nelson argues created a “two-channel welfare state,” able-bodied white men should be guaranteed work, and others with no breadwinner to rely upon should receive aid.²⁵ By instituting these divides, the New Deal intensified the already profound cultural meanings assigned to work and dependence. Moreover, exclusion from work had growing repercussions as New Deal policy linked social rights such as old age pensions and unemployment insurance to work.²⁶ Furthermore, as Fraser and Gordon have shown, the New Deal further heightened the stigma attached to aid and dependency. Whereas work entitled citizens to the benefits of social insurance, relief, or unearned aid, carried with it the indignities of means and morals tests and supervision.²⁷ Scholars have built on, extended, and critiqued this model, providing a more nuanced view of the state’s inclusions and exclusions.²⁸ Examining how the state managed disability enriches this conversation. Disability is simultaneously another binary in a matrix of inclusion and exclusion and yet transcends the typical boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, cutting across distinctions based on race, gender, and class. Disability shaped work-earned entitlements, veterans’ benefits, and the aid programs most often considered welfare.

Despite President Roosevelt’s own disability, the New Deal state had both reflected and reinforced notions of fitness for employment that drew on assumptions that disabled people could or should not work. The Social Security Act provided grants to the states to support relief payments to needy blind citizens and increased funding for the civilian rehabilitation program. With the Aid to the Blind program and an expansion of rehabilitation policy, the New Deal underscored disabled people’s exclusion. Even in rehabilitation, a program designed to help people with disabilities return to work, the state marked disabled people as others who required aid, instruction, and assistance—presumably from an able-bodied individual—to work. Essentially, the program sought to help the individual conform to social expectations, leaving intact and perhaps even fortifying able-bodied privilege.

U.S. involvement in World War II necessitated state action to draw the New Deal promise within reach for disabled Americans. While the nation’s factories took up the task of supplying Allied troops with the tools of war, millions of young men left the factory floor and headed to the front lines. Labor shortages rapidly replaced unemployment as the economic concern of the nation, and the need for workers pushed the federal government to develop policies to support and encourage the employment of people with disabilities. Just as the needs of the wartime economy challenged gendered and racial prescriptions about work, physical fitness as an abstract prerequisite for work fell by the wayside, and a vast majority of the nation’s factories put disabled workers on their payrolls.²⁹

World War II catalyzed disability activism by facilitating the dramatic influx of people with disabilities into the workforce, fostering a sense that individual rights were at the heart of American identity, and linking war work and volunteer activities on the home front to victory. In the context of the war and fascism, American patriotism focused around a notion of individual rights. Those rights set the United States and Americans apart from their enemies, and those rights fueled the drive to protect and celebrate the nation and became central to how Americans understood citizenship and what it meant to be an American. As people with disabilities responded to the nation’s call for manpower, many gained opportunities that had been closed to them before the war. Alone, this experience might have shifted disabled individuals’ expectations for the postwar economy and of the state, but wartime propaganda infused this working experience with deeper meaning. In linking war work and volunteerism with victory and patriotism, propaganda suggested that people with disabilities who had helped on the home front were serving the nation, helping to protect a range of rights, not all of which people with disabilities could themselves enjoy.

World War II also created an acute public awareness of disability. Everywhere, it seemed, the nation confronted disability. Reflecting on his experience managing the nation’s draft, Major General Lewis B. Hershey, director of the Selective Service System, painted a grim portrait of the physical and mental condition of the nation. More than five million young men had been found physically, mentally, or emotionally unfit for service—a fact Hershey believed “should give citizens of America cause for alarm.” World War II, and the need for soldiers and laborers, served as a lens that brought disability into clear focus. “It is quite useless,” Hershey said, “to talk of democracy and the acceptance of equal obligation by all our citizens when a very considerable proportion of these citizens are unable to carry out their civic obligations.”³⁰ Hershey’s bleak testimony not only suggests the persistence of (dis)ability in defining citizenship but also the way the war made disability visible and rendered it urgent.

With the grim realities discovered by the Selective Service, labor campaigns that drew hundreds of thousands of disabled Americans into the workforce, an astonishing accident rate that produced each year during the war on the home front more than two million workplace accidents that caused at least a temporary disability, and the specter of the disabled veteran, the war provoked a new and powerful awareness of disability.³¹ In 1945, a House joint resolution suggested that the “problem” of disability would “be more severe at the conclusion of World War II than at any other period in the history of our country.”³² Policymakers understood disability as a “problem” because of its perceived power to disrupt and strain the structures and relationships that tied citizens to the state—employer and employee, husband and wife, and family and child. AFPH leaders recognized the potential of this visibility and urgency. Indeed, AFPH president Strachan often pointed to insight he had gained during World War I from a fellow organized labor legislative representative that unions would secure gains in disability policy only when “the horrors of disablement” of the war were fresh in people’s minds.³³

The history of the AFPH challenges existing narratives of the disability rights movement and our understanding of twentieth-century American social movements. I join with numerous scholars whose work, as historian Felicia Kornbluh has described it, “interrupts a metanarrative of civil rights struggles in the twentieth century that begins with the movement against legal Jim Crow and extends chronologically to the women’s, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), environment, and disability movements, with the latter usually treated as though it began in the 1970s.”³⁴ Like historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, who argues for a “long civil rights movement” to more accurately describe the African American civil rights movement, I argue disability activism has a long history. And like the African American civil rights movement, the politics of World War II and the New Deal shaped the disability rights movement.³⁵

AFPH leaders understood coalition building as a vital tool in enacting their vision for an accessible state, and the organization recruited the support of organized labor. The AFL, CIO, UMWA, IAM, and other unions helped to finance the AFPH and provided it with organizational and legislative support. Working-class members’ networks at the local level and Strachan’s connections from his work as a labor organizer helped to facilitate the disability rights-organized labor coalition, but the ties between movements ran deeper. As AFPH leaders and members cultivated the support of organized labor, they tapped into a deep history in which disability and safety concerns helped to fuel union organization and a sense that disability itself was a working-class problem, often caused by dangerous workplaces and a lack of health care. In their interactions with the AFPH, organized labor leaders drew connections between the AFPH agenda and labor’s broader vision for the state and democracy. The AFPH agenda offered a concrete link between traditional union concerns about health and safety and newer goals of expanding the protections offered by the welfare state and helped focus labor’s attention on both union and nonunion disabled people.³⁶

Wartime necessities drove the Roosevelt administration and Congress to expand disability policy. In the postwar period, however, the sense of crisis surrounding disability remained. Both AFPH members and liberal policymakers sought to channel that feeling of crisis. Disability figured in President Harry S. Truman’s Fair Deal vision from his earliest articulations of his domestic agenda. To ensure “health security for all,” he called for social insurance to cover disability and sickness, national health insurance, government-sponsored medical and scientific research, federal funding to build health care facilities, and greater attention to public health. But his Fair Deal was larger than disability. It represented a commitment to a wider vision of economic security through full employment, affordable housing, and a higher minimum wage and civil rights.³⁷ Postwar liberals who supported the Fair Deal agenda argued that the prevalence of disability and the conditions that disabled people faced justified a wide sweep of Fair Deal aims, but they supported disability activists’ arguments that the federal government needed to do more to make the promise of the New Deal accessible to people with disabilities. This ongoing sense of crisis around disability and the AFPH campaign for greater opportunities drew numerous voices—members of Congress, disabled people, organized labor leaders, physicians, a growing number of experts who claimed specialized knowledge in the field of disability, and leaders in the Department of Labor (DOL), Federal Security Agency (FSA), and the rehabilitation bureaucracy—into a national dialogue about disability and policy in the postwar state. Many questions emerged in this debate. Did the problems people with disabilities faced stem from discrimination or problems inherent in the individual? Should experience of disability or expert knowledge guide policy? Should it focus on providing jobs or medical support? Both AFPH leaders and experts in the field of rehabilitation offered answers to these questions that would ultimately shape the future of U.S. disability policy. Throughout much of the 1940s and 1950s, the AFPH sought to make the state, economic security, and citizenship accessible, but the horrors of war that had created a space for disability activists to be heard also lent weight to the authority of a growing body of professionals who claimed expertise over disability and people with disabilities. As postwar policymakers sought to extend disability policy and the welfare state more generally, they had to navigate a growing gap between disability activists’ demands and the prescriptions of disability experts.

The chapters that follow, organized in a roughly chronological order, trace the story of the AFPH—its claims, demands, and vision as well as its efforts to translate its vision into action, policy, and change. But they also tell a broader story about the growth of the disability rights movement; how policymakers, bureaucrats, activists, physicians, and a range of professionals grappled with disability during World War II and the immediate postwar years; how the (dis)ability binary continued to define citizenship; and how disability intersected with liberal policymakers’ postwar vision for an expanded welfare state.

Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the moment of World War II. Chapter 1 examines how disabled Americans fought to contribute to victory and for greater opportunities to participate in the growing prosperity on the home front during World War II. It also illustrates how the needs of the wartime economy and disabled veterans led the Roosevelt administration and Congress to push businesses to employ disabled workers and develop policies to facilitate disabled people’s entry into the workforce as well as disabled veterans’ integration into the peacetime economy. Chapter 2 focuses on the House of Representatives’ two-year investigation on aid to people with disabilities, beginning in August 1944. The subcommittee that led the investigation interviewed disability activists, government officials, organized labor leaders, physicians, and employers.³⁸ The AFPH, which had fought for the investigation, used the hearings to highlight the failings of federal disability policy and the discrimination that disabled people faced on the job market and in education.

Chapter 3 turns to the reconversion moment. It examines how postwar anxieties contributed to the growth of the AFPH. As the organization worked to expand its base, leaders worked to foster unity and community and develop coalitions to put political weight behind the AFPH objectives. The chapter also analyzes how the policies put in place during World War II shifted in the postwar era. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on specific AFPH initiatives—National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week (NEPHW), the President’s Committee on NEPHW, and the AFPH legislative campaign to overhaul federal disability policy generally, but rehabilitation policy more specifically. Chapter 5 also examines the organization’s coalition with the labor movement that drew on union concerns about health and safety and labor’s postwar vision for a more robust welfare state. Chapter 6 analyzes the AFPH’s final years and disability policy under the Eisenhower administration.

A Note on Sources

No central collection of AFPH papers exists. In an effort to reconstruct the history of the organization and trace the contours of the state’s relationship with disability, I have drawn on a diverse range of previously neglected primary sources. Taking a broad view of state action, I analyzed both the creation of disability policy on the legislative side and its administration on the executive side. I drew on the Congressional Record and legislative hearings as well as archival research at the National Archives and the Harry S. Truman and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Libraries. I examined the organizational papers of the DOL, the FSA, the President’s Committee on Employment of the Physically Handicapped, the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army, and the Veterans Administration; the papers of both presidents Truman and Roosevelt; and the papers of numerous government officials. In the absence of central collection of AFPH papers, these federal sources offer a window to the organization’s activities because of its strong ties to the DOL, participation in the President’s Committee, and continual interaction with a number of federal officials. The AFL, CIO, and a number of other unions provided much of the funding and legislative support that made the AFPH campaign for disability rights possible. As a result, the George Meany Memorial Archives and the Walter Reuther Library offer rich resources about the activities of the AFPH and its relationship with organized labor. Two small collections of AFPH newsletters and magazines at the New York Public Library and City College of New York, respectively, provide a more nuanced picture of the AFPH. Various government publications, contemporary periodical literature, newspapers, union publications, and professional journals complement these archival sources.