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Chapter 1

Salvaging People: Disability in a Nation at War

In December 1942, the New York Times ran the thirty-first installment of its annual public appeal, “New York’s 100 Neediest Cases,” in which the Times, in partnership with eight relief organizations, sought contributions to “lift the Neediest out of despair.” As in other years, the Times sifted the lists of partner organizations to discover the one hundred neediest cases, individuals worthy of aid—“good people, brave people, people overwhelmed by conditions beyond their control.” The newspaper sought to answer the question its readers would surely ask: how “in these days of public relief and war employment” are there still individuals in need of aid? Even amidst wartime prosperity and with a system of public relief, the Times responded preemptively, there “is a kind of sorrow that knows no season.” These “neediest cases” fell into “a No-Man’s Land of human needs in which public relief does not operate,” and where the prosperity ignited by war industries did not touch.¹

Ideas about worthiness for assistance, shaped by social and class values, gendered thinking, notions of dependency, and thoughts on poverty no doubt informed the selection of these cases as the “neediest” in the city. In the calculus of need, however, the limits of public relief weighed heavily. Permanent and temporary disability and ill health sat at the heart of seventy-seven of the one hundred cases and cast a shadow across nearly every case, as relief workers feared that poverty, stress, emotional turmoil, and poor housing would wreck the health and threaten the sanity of even those regarded as fit. That disability and illness figured so prominently on the list suggests that both shaped the no man’s land where public relief did not function or failed the individuals it sought to assist. For example, nineteen-year-old wheelchair user Jack B., case five among the neediest one hundred, needed hospitalization and special treatments for a bone disease that affected his legs before he could be eligible to participate in a job-training program for disabled individuals. Medical treatments and training for Jack B. were well beyond the financial means of his widowed mother, whose income barely met day-to-day expenses. Jack B.’s situation was typical among people with disabilities in the early 1940s. In fact, the federal-state rehabilitation program that existed to provide the type of training Jack B. needed to land a job often required clients undergo medical treatments, yet until 1943 federal law prevented the program from paying for those treatments. The New Deal had instituted new forms of aid for people with disabilities, including offering public relief for impoverished blind citizens, expanding funding for the federal-state rehabilitation program, and providing medical services for children with disabilities through the Social Security Act. Yet, as story after story in the Times attested, these policies only scratched the surface of need. Ill health of any family member could disrupt a home, exhaust a family’s savings, lead to spiraling debts, and require treatments many families simply could not manage.²

As the Times acknowledged, Americans, engaged in a global war, confronted a vastly different economic situation in 1942 than they had only a few years before. By December 1942, U.S. participation in World War II had transformed the nation’s economy, its society, and its citizens’ lives. Even before the United States declared war in 1941, unemployment lines had begun to disappear as the nation supplied the industrial and agricultural needs of its British and Soviet allies. In the wake of the December 1941 Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor that drew the nation into war, military spending exploded. In the first half of 1942, the military issued over one hundred billion dollars in purchasing contracts. Gone were the days of desperation and deprivation that characterized the Depression years. Employment and consumption shot upward, with American purchases of books, jewelry, records, cosmetics, and more at new highs during the war. The wartime economy facilitated the creation of seventeen million new jobs, and these new jobs paid well, including frequent overtime work.³

In the best of situations, the necessities of war constrained the prosperity it created. The federal government called on Americans to conserve, sacrifice, and work when and where they were needed in service to the defense of the nation. Production restrictions and efforts to conserve narrowed consumer options, even changing fashions, with hemlines moving upward and doublebreasted suits and trouser cuffs disappearing. The federal government limited the construction of homes and banned the manufacture of automobiles for private use. The transition from supplier to combatant created new burdens for the expanding economy as the war campaign not only heightened production needs but also drew millions of young men out of the workforce and into the military. The nation now confronted a new economic crisis—labor shortages.⁴

For people with disabilities, wartime prosperity was not always easily accessed, and the sacrifices demanded by the war often weighed heavily on them. Services to disabled children slowed as care providers joined the armed forces, the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the state programs it funded encountered “spiraling costs,” transportation to clinics and other care facilities became more difficult to arrange, and production restrictions limited the availability of assistive devices and braces.⁵ Gas and tire rationing made it difficult for people with mobility impairments to work, as accessible public transportation was decades away.⁶

At the same time, however, the war rendered disability legible to policymakers in new and powerful ways. The desperate need for workers forced the federal government to develop and expand policies to bring disabled citizens into the workforce. The speed of production, the massive growth of industry, the dangers inherent in war production, and the influx of unseasoned workers and new machinery combined to produce an explosion of industrial accidents, swelling the ranks of disabled citizens and increasing the need for disability services. The draft heightened the sense that disability presented a problem that must be solved for the success of the war as physical inspection of the nation’s men provided concrete evidence of the extent of disability in the United States. Moreover, policymakers were painfully aware that the war itself would create disability. Indeed, in a message to Congress in October 1942, President Roosevelt, himself an ever-present reminder of the threat of polio, pointed out that military casualties were already on the rise and predicted that “the tremendous strides in medical science during the past two decades” would mean that a great number of men would survive battle wounds and return home disabled.⁷ Finally, people with disabilities clamored to participate in the war effort and the growing prosperity around them.

These realities produced a wave of disability activism during the war. The American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH) was founded in 1940 and chartered in August 1942 as a nonprofit educational and beneficent organization in Washington, D.C., just months before the Times published its appeal.⁸ During the early years of the war, the AFPH demanded that the federal government facilitate disabled people’s entry into war work by pushing for expanded services from the federal-state rehabilitation program, the U.S. Employment Service, the U.S. Civil Service Commission, and the War Manpower Commission (WMC). Moreover, the organization demanded that people with disabilities have a say in shaping federal disability policy. While the AFPH represented something new—a national organization recruiting members across the spectrum of physical disabilities, civilian and veteran alike—older organizations built around the shared experience of a specific disability or military service also pushed for greater access to wartime prosperity and new services to promote equality and opportunity. The politics of aid, work, and representation inspired the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), a national social movement organization of blind Americans, also founded in 1940.⁹

As disability activists clamored for inclusion in the drive to defend the nation, in the prosperity the war created, and in the promises of the New Deal state, policymakers sought to address a cluster of issues—the need for military personnel, the shortage of workers, and how to provide services for disabled veterans.¹⁰ Disability cut across these issues. Drawing disabled Americans into the workforce could potentially free able-bodied men for military service and help solve the chronic labor shortages. Yet the spiraling accident rate on the home front compounded the labor problem. The factors that had created a no man’s land in public relief, where people like Jack B. fell through the cracks, and the discrimination that people with disabilities faced on the job market, complicated policymakers’ efforts to bring disabled citizens into war service and encouraged the federal government to rethink disability policy in the context of war.

A Disability Rights Wartime Agenda

During the same month that the AFPH received its charter, Nazi forces unleashed an offensive on the city of Stalingrad, initiating a grueling monthslong battle that would break the German offensive in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the first U.S. bombers launched attacks in continental Europe. In the Pacific in August 1942, U.S. forces landed on the island of Guadalcanal, continuing the shift from defensive to offensive that began with the Allied victory at Midway in June. On the home front, disruption reigned. Millions of men and women moved for military service and better job opportunities. Housing grew scarce in military and industrial centers. Labor shortages helped to drive this mobility and scarcity, as labor needs drove wages up and drew a more mobile population. In this context, employers and the federal government struggled to reduce turnover and recruit new workers.¹¹

The need for labor and the nation’s call for its citizens to sacrifice in the name of democracy precipitated a civil rights moment. African Americans had already demonstrated that discrimination was vulnerable to attack in the context of a war against fascism. In 1941, African Americans wrested important victories against racism in the form of Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in defense employment, and the Fair Employment Practices Committee, charged with enforcing the order. This success came when A. Philip Randolph, leader of the African American union the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened a march on Washington to protest segregation in the military and racial discrimination in defense employment. The threatened march was just the beginning of a larger campaign against racism at home in the context of the war abroad. Randolph and other activists leveraged the tight labor market and international reputation of the United States in negotiations with the White House.¹² Ultimately, the need for labor would expand employment opportunities for people of color and women, and would provide opportunities for people with disabilities as well.¹³

Even before the organization secured its charter, the AFPH articulated an activist agenda that, like the civil rights movement, linked its campaign for greater rights for people with disabilities to the war effort. For example, AFPH founder Strachan appealed to Congress in May 1942 “not only to save scrap, but save and utilize men and women who have been, are, or may be scrapped by reason of disability.”¹⁴ In August 1942, the AFPH National Council slammed the federal government for its failure to fully utilize citizens with disabilities in war production. Despite pronouncements from the WMC, the Federal Security Agency (FSA), and the Civil Service Commission, the council’s report concluded, efforts to aid citizens with disabilities and draw on their work for national defense had yielded “far more promises than performance.”¹⁵

In a series of articles that appeared in the Congressional Record in April and May 1942, Strachan outlined a broad political agenda for the new organization—one that emphasized jobs and the war emergency. He declared that people with disabilities represented “a valuable and worth-while reservoir of hitherto almost untapped strength” to bring to the problem of labor shortages. He pointed out that while the nation saved aluminum, rubber, and oil, among other materials, little effort had gone toward “saving and utilizing men.” Strachan proposed five key initiatives that would form the core of the AFPH wartime agenda and that, he argued, would better serve a nation at war: expansion of the federal-state rehabilitation program, a federal agency for people with disabilities, a national education campaign focused on employment of people with disabilities, special consideration in public employment, and a national advisory council.¹⁶

For people with disabilities, the federal-state rehabilitation program represented an unrealized promise of inclusion and opportunity. Strachan cited Division of Vocational Rehabilitation statistics that nearly 800,000 Americans became permanently disabled each year, including congenital and disease- and accident-related disabilities. Yet, he pointed out, “despite all the effort and hullabaloo,” only around 30,000 individuals a year were rehabilitated, leaving “a huge army—approximating 770,000—for which there has been no rehabilitation.”¹⁷ In 1942, when Strachan penned his recommendations, the rehabilitation service was rapidly proving it was ill equipped for the war. One commentator in the field described the civilian rehabilitation program at the time as “beset by limitations” and “groping for a sound operational basis.”¹⁸ Indeed, before 1943, the program had served fewer than 210,000 people over the course of twenty-three years. State agencies had considerably limited financial and personnel resources. In 1942, most agencies had fewer than ten rehabilitation professionals; ten states employed just one. California, the largest state program at the time, employed thirty-seven people, not including clerical workers.¹⁹

The Smith-Fess Act of 1920, which had established the civilian rehabilitation program, defined the end goal of rehabilitation as making disabled individuals “fit to engage in a remunerative occupation.”²⁰ In the shared federal-state administration of the civilian program, the U.S. Office of Education established standards, policies, and procedures for states; monitored state plans and their use of federal funds; and sponsored research in the field of rehabilitation. In turn, states handled the actual business of rehabilitating people with disabilities and promoting the program. The Office of Education required states to develop and maintain their own administrative structures and to work with other federal, state, and private agencies to rehabilitate clients. Ultimately, the Office of Education determined that the main job of the rehabilitation program would be to “eliminate or ameliorate” the underlying causes that made people with disabilities “unemployable,” which, the agency concluded, were linked to “loss, impairment, or lack of” physical function or skill and “loss of morale.”²¹

According to Office of Education guidance, the rehabilitation process began with case workers considering an individual’s background and personality and then helping the individual secure any treatments that might create “improvement in the individual’s physical fitness.” Next, case workers selected a vocational goal for the individual and the most appropriate training to meet that goal. The Office of Education advocated that case workers utilize the placement assistance of other agencies but warned that job placement and follow-up with rehabilitants was a duty that should not be ignored as the goal of the process was to ensure that people with disabilities secured employment at “self-supporting” wages—a warning that suggested that rehabilitation case workers were sometimes more focused on the process of rehabilitation than the job placement at the end. The case workers, or field agents, that rehabilitation applicants encountered had a college education and experience in vocational rehabilitation, education, personnel management, or other relevant work, a requirement that could be waived with one to two years of graduate education. Beyond being “aggressive” and “energetic,” the Office of Education recommended that case workers be “physically capable,” suggesting that people with disabilities who sought assistance from the civilian rehabilitation program would most likely encounter an able-bodied individual who would assess their eligibility; suggest treatments, procedures, or aids; determine vocational goals for them; and set out a rehabilitation program they should follow.²²

Between the actual provisions of the law and the policies of the Office of Education, the rehabilitation program faced significant financial limitations. Funds could not be used for medical, surgical, or hospital care or on stipends to support rehabilitants during their training. Despite the designs of World War I orthopedic surgeons who sought to extend their authority into the field of vocational rehabilitation, Congress had implemented a clear separation between medical and vocational rehabilitation. It did so initially in its program for veterans, vesting the U.S. Army Medical Department with control over medical rehabilitation and the Office of Education with control over the vocational element until the 1921 establishment of the Veterans Bureau, the forerunner to the Veterans Administration (VA). This separation of the medical and vocational aspects of veterans’ rehabilitation shaped the provisions of the civilian program and would continue to do so until 1943.²³

Federal funds also could not be used as capital for people with disabilities to launch businesses, and the agency explicitly banned the use of federal funds for the purchase of wheelchairs or for the repair or replacement of artificial limbs originally purchased by the rehabilitation program. Instead, federal funds paid for state administrative costs, tuition for training and educational programs, medical examinations to determine eligibility and “feasibility” for rehabilitation, and, in cases where funds could not be obtained through other sources, prosthetic devices and medical assistance in fitting them. The Office of Education, however, recommended that state rehabilitation programs carefully consider whether to purchase artificial limbs for rehabilitants, weighing the decision between the “urgency of need,” the “substantiality of results,” and the availability of other funds for the device.²⁴

In the context of civilian rehabilitation, eligibility did not guarantee services, and before 1943, personal or family financial resources were almost always required for assistance. To be eligible for assistance, an individual had to be “unable because of a permanent physical handicap to earn a livelihood.” The agency maintained, however, that “such factors as advanced age, degree of physical disability, attitude of mind, or social status, sometimes make it inadvisable, uneconomic, or impossible to” rehabilitate an individual. “Feasible” applicants had disabilities that would still allow them to be trained and placed in full-time jobs. They were “mentally competent” and not in need of “constant supervision.” Their attitude suggested that they would “get along with others,” indicating “promise of cooperation” both through the rehabilitation process and in later employment situations. Feasible applicants had to have means for supporting themselves and their dependents during the rehabilitation process. Finally, an individual’s feasibility hinged on the availability of training programs in the area.²⁵

Given these constraints, the AFPH’s Strachan argued that expanding rehabilitation alone would not yield a program that could effectively “conserve and develop” the human resources people with disabilities could bring to the war effort or meet the social and economic needs of people with disabilities in the postwar period. Legislating more rehabilitation, a “slow” process of training and education, Strachan insisted, would take too long to meet wartime labor needs. Additionally, he pointed out that various proposals in Washington to expand the program contemplated doubling funding, a prospect he felt fell short of meeting war needs or adequately serving people with disabilities but supported nonetheless.²⁶

Strachan viewed establishing a federal agency for people with disabilities, either through legislative or executive action, as vital in achieving the organization’s most ambitious aims of ending disability discrimination in employment and education and promoting a comprehensive federal disability policy that would ensure people with disabilities could access opportunity and security. In this first articulation of a goal that would shape the organization’s agenda throughout its existence, Strachan argued that federal programs dealing with disability should be consolidated in an agency that would collect information about disability and disabled citizens’ welfare, research and publicize the types of employment in which they could excel, encourage equal employment in private industry, and help facilitate rehabilitation and job placement. Moreover, he asserted that people with disabilities should themselves control disability policy, suggesting that they staff the agency. When Strachan first described the proposed agency, he envisioned a bureau in the FSA, forerunner to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Since its creation in 1939, the FSA had housed the Office of Education and the civilian rehabilitation program along with the Employment Service, Social Security Board, and the U.S. Public Health Service. As the AFPH and civilian rehabilitation developed during the war and postwar period, the organization would eventually seek a home for its proposed agency in the Department of Labor (DOL).²⁷

In Strachan’s view, public education, built around a coalition effort, would be necessary to effect the changes the AFPH envisioned. He described efforts to enlist “every group at interest” in a national education campaign that would incorporate the press and radio. Strachan argued that few beyond people with disabilities understood the problems they faced and the significance of those problems to the nation. Through a national public education campaign, he believed “it would be thus possible to reach down into the subconscious minds of the average man and woman, and vividly portray just what the relation of the physically handicapped is to them as individuals.” In particular, he emphasized that such a campaign could highlight the fact that, if the majority of people with disabilities were “put to work,” tax burdens would be lightened for everyone and the nation’s productivity would increase—a key point given the realities of labor shortages.²⁸ As part of this public education campaign, he called for the establishment of a “National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week.” Like his broader plans for public education, Strachan envisioned a cooperative effort that would engage political groups, women’s organizations, disability organizations, veterans’ associations, and industrial, business, labor, education, civic, and religious leaders along with stage and screen stars.²⁹ In a national education campaign that sought to make other organizations and the public more generally understand disability as a problem that mattered to them and employment opportunities as the solution, Strachan recognized an opportunity to build coalitions and support for the AFPH agenda and to reach and organize a broader range of people with disabilities.

While employment broadly defined animated the AFPH agenda, the organization paid special attention to government employment. Strachan called on the Civil Service Commission and state-level commissions to establish special divisions for people with disabilities and to give them “special consideration” for public employment. For this effort to be successful, he proposed that the Civil Service Commission launch a study of government employees to determine how many, where, and how effectively people with disabilities were engaged in public service work.³⁰

Finally, Strachan suggested extending this research on a much broader scale, and including people with disabilities in the process, to develop effective policies to benefit people with disabilities. He proposed a national advisory council, including disabled people and representatives of their organizations, to expand the employment of people with disabilities and the range of vocational options available to them, by studying employment patterns, vocational instruction, and existing laws and by providing legislative recommendations.³¹

At the heart of the organization’s short- and long-term goals was a demand to make the New Deal’s promises of economic security, opportunity, and work accessible to people with disabilities. In this promise of work and economic security, AFPH leaders saw the path to full citizenship. The organization’s emphasis on public education and its specific legislative proposals grew out of the central idea that the state had a responsibility to make its promises a reality for people with disabilities. The AFPH demanded that the state facilitate disabled citizens’ inclusion in the promise of the New Deal through a range of policies that would support their access to the workplace. Over time, the organization’s agenda would include better educational opportunities, health care, improved medical treatments, and physical access to public spaces.

AFPH organizing efforts hinged on the notion that personal experience of disability was necessary to form effective and just disability policy. Members, therefore, had a unique service to offer the nation. More than just demanding that their experiences and opinions be taken into account, the AFPH imagined a disability bureaucracy staffed as much as possible by people with disabilities themselves. In this context, the AFPH campaign represented both an implicit and explicit challenge to a range of experts who claimed authority in the field of disability services.

The organization drew on the patriotic fervor of the war to justify their demands, highlighting notions of freedom, justice, national defense, and victory, casting disability rights as imperative to the moral and actual survival of the nation. Strachan claimed that improving disabled people’s lives and prospects, bringing them into the workforce, and expanding federal programs were “vitally important to the continuance of our Nation as the citadel of freedom and social justice to the individual.”³² He argued that in the United States it was the “human beings who compose our citizenry” that formed the “first, and last, lines of defense” and “conserving and developing” that resource was as central to victory as it would be to postwar economic and social stability.³³

Strachan pointed out that it cost $500 per year to support an unemployed disabled adult, whereas $300 spent on rehabilitating that person would make that person self-supporting. Recognizing and facilitating the productive capacity of people with disabilities could save the state money otherwise spent on the care of those individuals. He further emphasized that the national significance of disability grew each day with war production, as the ranks of disabled Americans swelled at an enormous rate because of accidents and disease. According to Strachan, 460 million man-days had been lost to industrial accidents as compared to 30 million lost to strikes.³⁴ The comparison was a pointed one as growing antistrike sentiment, particularly after a series of coal strikes the following year, led Congress to curb organized labor’s power with the Smith-Connally Act, passed over the president’s veto in 1943.³⁵ In demonstrating that industrial accidents far overshadowed the problem of strikes in undermining defense production, Strachan sought to position disability as an issue that was central to the war effort and deserved congressional attention.

Indeed, the home front was a dangerous place. In June 1942, William A. Irvin, head of the National Safety Council’s War Production Fund to Conserve Manpower, declared, “One of the most destructive attacks on our nation last year was not made by a foreign enemy. The attack came from within, and left in its wake 102,500 dead—more than twice the 49,475 killed in the AEF [American Expeditionary Forces] ranks during World War I. Moreover, it left 350,000 persons permanently disabled and inflicted 9,000,000 other lesser casualties.”³⁶ Irvin’s figures paint a broad portrait of accidents on the home front, including those that happened on the factory floor and highways and in homes and recreation. Still, wartime production exacted a heavy toll. Safety director at Pullman Company and member of the DOL National Committee for Conservation of Manpower in War Industries Harry Guilbert reported that industrial accidents in 1941 had killed enough draft-aged men to fill two full army divisions. Prior to World War II, industrial accidents typically claimed 16,000 lives and disabled, at least temporarily, around 1.5 million annually. Over the course of 1940, that figure shot up at least 10 percent. Data from early 1942 suggested that the situation had grown much worse. In Illinois, monthly figures pointed to a 20 percent increase in fatal accidents from 1941 to 1942.³⁷

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the rate of disabling and deadly industrial accidents would remain above two million per year for the duration of the war. In 1943, the worst year for industrial workers on the home front, over 128,000 Americans died or developed a permanent disability and another 2.28 million experienced a temporary disability because of a workplace accident.³⁸ In July 1942, Louis F. Buckley of the Bureau of Employment Security wrote that the war created a disastrous cluster of unsafe conditions through “the speeding up of production, employment of inexperienced help and women, long hours, expansion into two or three shifts leaving little time for maintenance work, hasty renovation of old machinery and crowding in of new machinery, the opening of long-closed factories and of new ones planned in haste, and the use of poisonous chemicals.”³⁹

Activists Emerging from the Human Scrap Pile

The goals, strategy, connections, and style of the AFPH drew on the personal history of Paul Strachan. The organization’s founder and president had had more than his fair share of “hard knocks,” as one journalist phrased it. The hardest, perhaps, came in a deadly automobile crash in November 1929. Strachan, thirty-seven, was driving with his father in East Point, Georgia, just southwest of Atlanta. According to a witness, despite attempts to warn them, neither man saw the switch engine and line of railway cars until it was too late. The accident at the railroad crossing killed his father and left Strachan injured. Newspaper coverage of the incident reported that he was “badly bruised and cut.” Later accounts described more extensive injuries and a long recovery. Strachan emerged from the accident with a broken spine. At fifty-five, he reported that he had spent seven years of his life in and out of the hospital because of the accident, operations, and a host of other illnesses. Childhood diphtheria had damaged his hearing in one ear, and as a younger man, he had had a brush with death during the Spanish influenza pandemic. Later, he came down with amoebic dysentery from drinking polluted water. By the post-World War II period, Strachan was deaf and anemic; had chronic heart, kidney, and sinus troubles; had had a double hernia; and walked with a cane.⁴⁰

Strachan described his activism as “born of personal experience, as one 85 percent physically disabled, and who, because of that disability was cast upon the human scrap pile, despite a fierce and intense desire to live, to work, and to achieve.” Beyond his personal experience, he rooted his activism in “vivid and poignant recollections” of disabled veterans being “pushed around and ignored as soon as the parades stopped and the bands no longer played” and of other disabled individuals “who were the discards of society.”⁴¹ Strachan challenged what he termed an “unreasoning, unjust prejudice against millions of Handicapped people.” Questioning the injustice he perceived around him, he asked, “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?”⁴²

Strachan’s colorful past took him across the country, gave him access to government officials and labor leaders, provided connections in Hollywood, and helped him to develop a magnetic personal style and a skillset well-suited to launching a movement. Born in Perry, Michigan, in February 1892, Strachan grew up in Michigan and Georgia. He learned an important skill early in life—typing—most likely from his father, who was a journalist. By age sixteen, he had left school and was working as a stenographer at a law office. From there, he took to traveling, pursuing a host of jobs that took him around the world. He claimed to have prospected for gold in Alaska and worked as a stevedore, sailor, and steamship agent.⁴³

Strachan moved to Washington, D.C, during World War I and would eventually find work in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. The bureau initially insured ships and crews navigating the Atlantic war zone but grew dramatically with the War Risk Insurance Act, which issued payments to servicemen’s dependents during and in the immediate years following World War I. This work led Strachan to become active in the National Federation of Federal Employees, serving as a legislative representative and general organizer as well as a consultant on federal employees to Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). From 1917 to 1922 and intermittently after 1931, he worked for the AFL, helping to organize the American Federation of Government Employees, of which he was still a member in the 1950s, and assisting several other unions, including the Post Office Clerks. His work in the Bureau of War Risk Insurance and the labor movement led to an interest in vocational training, which inspired him to help Arthur Holder of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and the AFL on federal vocational education initiatives.⁴⁴ His own experience as laborer, labor organizer, and labor lobbyist as well as his knowledge about and interest in vocational education and rehabilitation not only shaped the rhetoric, tactics, and demands of the movement he led but also solidified ties between organized labor and the disability rights movement.

During the 1920s, Strachan held a range of positions in the burgeoning film industry, experience that helped him cultivate a dynamic personal style and a new set of personal connections. By 1924, he had returned to Georgia and was living in Atlanta and working as a salesman for First National Pictures, which would later merge with Warner Brothers. Later in the decade, he worked for Pathé Exchange. At various points, he would describe himself as a film salesman, press agent, theater operator, producer, tour manager, and correspondent for theatrical papers.⁴⁵ His work in the film industry gave him the skills to captivate an audience, sell an idea, and promote a cause.

Strachan’s life again shifted course in the aftermath of his 1929 accident. He was unable to work and moved with his family from Georgia back to the Washington, D.C., area to live with relatives, relying on his wife’s income and shelter and support from her relatives until the family could get “back on their feet.”⁴⁶ Strachan worked intermittently with organized labor during the 1930s. A family member reflected that “life was a struggle” during the Depression for the Strachans.⁴⁷

That struggle was compounded in 1931. While traveling and doing organizational work for the AFL, Strachan stopped at a hotel in Chicago. Somewhere along the way, he drank polluted water and developed amoebic dysentery, which began a nearly ten-year period of chronic illness, as no effective treatment for chronic dysentery existed. By the time he checked into Johns Hopkins for “a long siege” and a new treatment in 1940, Strachan had lost a tremendous amount of weight and developed pernicious anemia and an enlarged pericardium. He had also lost his hearing, which at the time, he thought, was perhaps a temporary side effect of one of his ailments or the many treatments he had tried. The hearing loss, however, was permanent. Strachan described his health as having declined to the point “where there seemed no hope.” He suggested that the famous insurance market “Lloyd’s [of London] would not have given less than 1000 to 1 odds that I would survive even the treatment.” His family’s finances had also suffered from his inability to work. He wrote that for “several years” he “was confined to bed, and unable to move,” a condition that had left him and his family “completely broke.”⁴⁸

Strachan’s treatments at Johns Hopkins did not cure all that ailed him, but he regained nearly fifty pounds. Still, he was, as he described it, “obliged to live, of course, on a most rigid dietary regimen.”⁴⁹ It was during this stay at Johns Hopkins that Strachan would become committed to disability rights. In 1940, he developed the plan for the AFPH though the organization did not take off until 1942. In the meantime, he eked out a living doing research, writing, and performing some legislative work, while investigating disability issues in his free time.⁵⁰

Strachan approached the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) in 1941, seeking information and offering his service to the organization. A group of Gallaudet University-educated deaf leaders had founded the NAD in 1880 to represent the interests of deaf Americans and to address discrimination against deaf citizens nationally. Initially, Strachan suggested that the organization needed representation in Washington, writing to NAD president Tom L. Anderson that he had scoured House and Senate documents but could not find any pending proposals to advance the welfare of deaf Americans where he had found many for blind people. Also, in searching for organizations he might devote his time and expertise to, none of his Washington acquaintances pointed to the NAD.⁵¹

At first, NAD leaders seemed receptive to Strachan. Anderson responded to Strachan’s original inquiry, “We need such a man as you in Washington, the worst way.” He also noted that the organization did not have the finances “to pay for help of the sort we really need.” Anderson outlined two key areas in which the NAD hoped to gain ground in the national political scene. The organization wanted Congress to establish a “Bureau for the Welfare of the Deaf” in the DOL, and it hoped to end arbitrary restrictions that civil service positions be filled by hearing individuals. Strachan responded with a good deal of insider knowledge, critiquing the NAD’s present strategy and suggesting more fruitful paths that ranged from rewriting the bill to placing the proposed bureau in the FSA, recruiting different sponsors, and pushing simultaneously for legislative and executive action. He also wrote that he was willing to work to demonstrate his abilities and perhaps position the organization to afford a Washington office in the future.⁵²

The relationship soured shortly after it began. Strachan overwhelmed NAD leaders with lengthy letters and plans for legislative, organizational, and fundraising drives.⁵³ After numerous exchanges and a meeting with NAD leaders, Strachan developed a two-part plan. The first part contained his recommendations for amending the NAD’s bureau proposal and pushing for its enactment. His suggestions ranged from working with all groups who might benefit from the bureau’s services, including hard-of-hearing and deafened individuals, to launching an all-out education and publicity campaign to secure support from the general public. The second part of his plan focused on the development of a “Washington Service Bureau.” This bureau would essentially be a national lobbying office that would push for favorable legislation and provide information to members about Civil Service examinations, government programs and jobs, members’ “rights, privileges, and prerogatives, as citizens of the United States,” and recourse when confronting discrimination. Strachan suggested that the NAD launch a membership campaign, expand its membership to include individuals “Deaf in whatever degree,” and develop new types of memberships to encourage donations. He also advised that the NAD should consider offering other services such as sick, death, and hospital benefits.⁵⁴

Anderson responded with a mixed assessment. He reported that he and other NAD leaders were generally behind his plans for revising and securing the passage of the welfare bureau bill but strongly against the Washington Service Bureau. Anderson conveyed other board members’ assessment that “Mr. Strachan undoubtedly isn’t familiar with the great multitude of the deaf,” in that he seemed to think that the rank and file could be roused into action through the Washington Service Bureau when the board knew “they raise the devil about the NAD because the NAD doesn’t get jobs for them, although that has never been the NAD objective.” Essentially, NAD officers proposed to use deaf leaders, working to stimulate interest in wider society, to replace Strachan’s plan for rank-and-file action. Still, the NAD hoped to hire Strachan if he would “work along the lines indicated in Part I alone” and agree to “certain control over [his] activities.”⁵⁵

Strachan took offense and fired off an angry nine-page letter. He defended the need for a legislative office and took issue with NAD leaders’ characterizations of rank-and-file members. While Anderson and others felt that members would not get behind action and the Washington Service Bureau, Strachan argued that many average deaf people felt “THAT THEIR OWN LEADERS, BY THEIR LACK OF ACTION, ARE THE BOTTLENECKS” (emphasis his). He also claimed that the key to ensuring members’ access to jobs was through government action. Strachan wrote that it was a “fatal mistake” to assume that passing any law would solve the problems of deaf Americans. Instead, he asserted that any law would be just the beginning of the work. Strachan took particular exception to Anderson’s desire to exert “control” over his efforts, writing, “if you talk to responsible people in any such fashion as this, they will promptly tell you to go to Hell!” Further, Strachan questioned “the ‘intent,’ interest, and enthusiasm necessary on the part of NAD officers to make an effective campaign.” He concluded that he was “deeply interested in helping the Deaf, in fact, ALL the Physically Handicapped” and vowed to continue working with or without the NAD. Ultimately, he suggested means by which he would be comfortable working with the NAD, but the damage was done. Anderson replied, “The utter impossibility of our expecting to come together in a common understanding of all the angles presented by the project you ask the NAD to sponsor, by mail, grows more and more apparent with each slap you choose to deal out to me and my responsible associates when we attempt to exercise a reasonable degree of restraint, or present our viewpoint.” The correspondence continued for another month, but it was clear that Strachan and the NAD were on radically different pages.⁵⁶

Strachan’s communication with the NAD hinted at the strategies he would employ in the AFPH and revealed the temper that would get him, and his organization, into trouble. The experience also shaped his opinion that people with disabilities lacked “the means and the leadership to come forward and properly present their cases for public consideration.” His opinion notwithstanding, a number of organizations had long represented disabled constituents, including the NAD.⁵⁷ New Deal, wartime, and postwar politics grew that number.

Another long-standing organization was the Disabled American Veterans (DAV), founded in 1920 by disabled World War I veterans, who were troubled by the lack of available services and the inefficiency, lack of coordination, and confusing mountains of paperwork required for the services that did exist.⁵⁸ During World War II, the organization aimed to “preserve America’s freedoms,” “equalize burdens and profits of war,” and improve the lives of “America’s disabled defenders.” DAV leaders sought to do this by pushing for growth of the military, efficient mobilization of labor on the home front, limits on wartime profits, greater pay for servicemen and women during and after service, disability insurance, and more thorough medical record keeping by the various branches of the armed services. Disabled veterans, the DAV maintained, needed the organization. It sought to expand what would count as a service-connected disability, increase the benefits disabled veterans received, soften VA guidelines for determining disability, harshen the punishment for feigning disability to gain benefits, expand vocational training and job placement programs for disabled veterans, extend hospital care for individuals with service- and nonservice-connected disabilities, expand the number of VA facilities, and provide greater financial support to the dependents and widows of disabled veterans.⁵⁹

Growth of the New Deal state spurred the organization of the NFB in 1940. At the state level, blind activists had fought for pensions and other aid programs for blind citizens throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These successes, in part, led New Deal policymakers to include Aid to the Blind in the Social Security Act of 1935. Moreover, Congress passed a series of laws that aimed to create employment opportunities for blind citizens. Blind activists, whose efforts had been focused at the state level, shifted strategy to the national level. The new organization’s president, Jacobus tenBroek, criticized the “intolerable authoritarian arrogance” of the Social Security Board and insisted blind people had to organize nationally to protect blind people’s interests. The NFB objected to nonblind professionals’ authority over programs for blind Americans and demanded representation for blind people. The organization also fought against employment discrimination.⁶⁰

These disparate organizations would push for a broad range of goals during World War II and the immediate postwar years, but greater employment opportunities, particularly amid the war-fueled job boom, would be a shared priority for disability activists. These organizations would also all demand a role for disabled people in the development and administration of disability policy. Taken together, these organizations would seek to channel the promise of the war moment to gain access to full citizenship.

Wartime Federal Disability Policy

As disability rights activists responded to the changing political landscape, policymakers confronted new realities that would make disability more visible and the problems that activists sought to address more pressing. In March 1942, John J. Corson, director of the Employment Service, declared that recruiting and placing the 10.5 million additional workers who would be necessary to meet the production demands of the war that year was “the biggest job of its kind ever imposed on a democracy.”⁶¹

By early 1942, the nation faced the difficult dilemma of growing the size and strength of the armed forces and meeting the ever-increasing production demands to outfit these new soldiers, sailors, and marines and our Allies with the tools of war. Before Pearl Harbor, the navy and marine corps relied on recruits, and the army had nearly drafted the 900,000 men it sought for preparedness. Overnight, military needs exploded and Selective Service, or draft, calls followed suit. Indeed, the army had called for 20,000 men in December 1941, but by December 1942 the monthly call came in at almost 500,000. Roughly a year after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt ended voluntary enlistment to allow local Selective Serve boards to determine where best a man might serve the nation—in the military or on the home front. In 1943, the Selective Service aimed to bring the size of the army to 7.7 million, the navy to 3.6 million, and the marine corps to 500,000. The process of drawing millions of men into the armed forces—hundreds of thousands of women also volunteered—shrank the labor pool, compounding the complex problem of making the materials of war. Indeed, even before Pearl Harbor, the demands of producing for the Allies and preparing for the possibility of war had created labor difficulties. As early as May 1940, FSA official Wayne Coy warned President Roosevelt, “The expansion of war industries is already creating local shortages of skilled labor.” By 1942, Corson emphasized the need for workers on the nation’s farms and in defense production. He also outlined the need for new thinking—drawing older and disabled individuals and people of color into the workforce, for example. So acute was the need for defense workers, Corson explained, that people would be shifted away from unnecessary jobs into war production.⁶²

The process of drafting men for military service also brought the extent of disability in the nation into focus. In September 1941, Lewis B. Hershey, director of the Selective Service System, wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, “The operation of Selective Service during the past twelve months has uncovered certain practical problems that are matters of the gravest concern to our Nation.” He noted that members of the Selective Service System had “been deeply concerned because of the numbers of men who do not meet the physical and mental standards prescribed by the Army.” Hershey felt that many could be rehabilitated for military service while “undoubtedly many of the others can be brought to a physical standard which would make them far more efficient as citizens of this nation.”⁶³ As Hershey’s letter suggests, the draft made disability more visible and imbued it with greater consequence.

The need for labor on the home front and soldiers on the frontlines, many of whom would become disabled at work or in combat, shaped the federal government’s response to disability during the war. Within days of the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt wrote to FSA head Paul McNutt, instructing him to work with various federal agencies to develop a plan for expanding vocational rehabilitation. Roosevelt hoped that the rehabilitation program could be retooled to both meet the needs of the disabled soldiers the war was sure to create and contribute to solving the nation’s man- and womanpower crisis.⁶⁴ McNutt responded quickly, meeting with officials from the military, VA, Selective Service System, War Production Board, DOL, Public Health Service, Office of Education and Division of Rehabilitation, and American Red Cross, among other agencies and groups. By February 1942, he had developed a plan to intensify the use of disabled workers in war industry and put some of it in motion.⁶⁵

The slow pace of the rehabilitation process, the fact that officials did not know the extent of disability in the nation, the rehabilitation program’s reliance on matching dollars from the states, and the lack of trained rehabilitation caseworkers made McNutt’s task all the more difficult. In 1941 and 1942, the service rehabilitated only 15,000 to 20,000 persons each year and placed just one in three clients in a job. Furthermore, McNutt recognized that the lack of knowledge about U.S. disabled citizens contributed to the difficulty of developing an effective plan. He admitted that he could not estimate “with any degree of accuracy” the number of disabled individuals of appropriate age who could benefit from rehabilitation. The Employment Service estimated that some 20 percent of its four million applicants had some sort of disability that contributed to their unemployment. Public Health Service data suggested that four million Americans had a permanent physical disability.⁶⁶

Ultimately, McNutt concluded that the program’s reliance on states’ matching dollars and the lack of caseworkers meant that it would be impossible to provide rehabilitation for every disabled citizen who could benefit from the service and be fitted for war work. Indeed, drafted individuals who were deemed not fit or able to be made fit for military service had already enhanced the pool of potential clients. McNutt predicted that military causalities and the explosion of industrial accidents would increase the existing caseload by up to 300,000 in the coming year alone. In early 1942, around 100,000 Americans were at some stage in the rehabilitation process, and McNutt believed that “possibly 150,000 additional persons can be accepted for direction toward and into war industry during this calendar year, though not all of these can be conditioned to stable and useful war work.” Still, he argued, many others could be placed directly into work. Regardless of the number of disabled citizens and the increase in disability, the fact that state rehabilitation agencies employed only about three hundred caseworkers in early 1942 limited the speed and size of potential growth. Moreover, any growth depended on federal dollars. Historically, the federal government had matched state contributions, but as McNutt pointed out, growing the program was “war service” and that growth could not wait for additional state appropriations, as many state legislatures would not be in session.⁶⁷

Despite these limitations, McNutt crafted a plan that would maximize rehabilitation’s potential for wartime aims. He worked with the National Labor Supply Committee of the Office of Production Management to develop a plan “to secure the widest possible acceptance by war industry of handicapped persons directly into plants for pre-job training or initiation into the job at once.” Then, he argued that the Employment Service, “because of its wide acquaintance with workers, employers, and labor market conditions,” must be central to the effort. He mandated that the agency, then part of the FSA, work with the rehabilitation service to place into jobs clients who had been rehabilitated and disabled individuals fit for direct employment. For individuals not quite ready for direct employment, McNutt suggested that the federal government encourage trade schools to accept disabled applicants, and he called on the rehabilitation program to intensify training courses to make them shorter and speed the entry of clients into the workforce. To support these efforts, he proposed to grow the rehabilitation workforce, recruiting and training the caseworkers needed to meet the war emergency.⁶⁸

McNutt argued that the federal government would have to increase appropriations for rehabilitation and that amendments to the Vocational Rehabilitation Act would be necessary “to provide a broader base for emergency purposes.” Because of the constraints related to federal-state matching appropriations, he called for additional federal funding during the war, $500,000 for fiscal year 1942 and a budget of $25 million for 1943. Beyond these increased appropriations, McNutt maintained that the law governing rehabilitation needed adjustments. In particular, he saw medical services and prostheses as “essential” to an expanded rehabilitation program. While those services were available to injured soldiers, sailors, and marines through the army, navy, and VA, the rehabilitation program could not yet provide medical care.⁶⁹

McNutt’s work with the National Labor Supply Committee yielded a concrete policy designed to promote the employment of people with disabilities in war industries. In January 1942, the committee issued a policy statement that advocated hiring people with disabilities for war work, a policy they believed would release physically fit men for military service and provide more laborers for war industries. Committee members, however, remained mindful of the postwar potential of such a policy, writing that disabled war workers might “supply experience that will facilitate the adjustment” of future disabled veterans. The National Labor Supply Committee billed hiring disabled workers as “a patriotic service.” Whether officials genuinely believed in the postwar value of this particular war effort or they simply sought to draw on the patriotic pull of disabled veterans, it is certain that committee members believed that disabled citizens would need assistance to become workers.⁷⁰

Echoing the thinking McNutt had presented to President Roosevelt, the National Labor Supply Committee tasked the Employment Service with the greatest responsibility in the campaign to convince employers to hire disabled workers. The committee called for the Employment Service to establish specialized services, work more closely with the rehabilitation program, and foster relationships with disability-focused private agencies, drawing on their expertise. Furthermore, the committee instructed Employment Service officials to analyze the work of disabled citizens to determine the types of war work that could be accomplished safely and productively by people with different types of disabilities.⁷¹

Beyond the Employment Service, the committee directed numerous government programs and urged private agencies to expand services for people with disabilities and focus their efforts around war production. Members of the committee outlined their aim to persuade industry and organized labor of the virtue of employing disabled individuals in war work and asked regional, state, and local labor committees to do the same. The committee advised rehabilitation officials to “intensify” their efforts to bring more people with disabilities into the war labor market and called on the Public Health Service to locate public and private agencies able to provide surgical or medical services to ready people with minor disabilities for war work. Finally, it asked private agencies to focus their energies on the immediate goal of preparing disabled citizens to contribute to the war economy. Within days of issuing this new disability policy, the War Production Board absorbed the Office of Production Management, but McNutt had gained the War Production Board Labor Division’s approval of the policy and goal of convincing industry to hire disabled workers.⁷²

In early February 1942, McNutt reached out to governors to secure their cooperation in utilizing disabled workers and to inform them that the FSA was developing plans to expand vocational rehabilitation at Roosevelt’s prompting. McNutt asked each governor to assist, as the actual work of rehabilitation happened through state agencies with both federal and state funds. He told governors that the rehabilitation training programs operated by their states would need to be faster and more intensive and that the links between rehabilitation and Employment Service offices shored up. Moreover, McNutt explained that he had directed the Employment Service to give the matter “special attention” and instructed his regional officers of the Vocational Rehabilitation Division to work with officials and rehabilitation organizations in each state. Finally, McNutt suggested that governors could offer “a signal service to the necessitous business of mobilizing all our manpower for the winning of this war” by making citizens of the state aware of available rehabilitation services, ensuring that disabled service members received “special consideration” by state rehabilitation offices, encouraging the governmentfunded vocational training programs in the state to recruit and accept disabled trainees, and making employers and agencies in the state aware of “the responsibility we have for the full utilization of the services of these handicapped workers as a very necessary element in our war effort.”⁷³

On 12 March, President Roosevelt referred McNutt’s proposal and his request to work for additional appropriations to the director of the budget for comment, but McNutt pressed the matter. At the end of March, he wrote the president, “War production is waiting on us in specific locations. The handicapped clientele is marking time.” In just under two months since he had written to the state governors, McNutt could report significant progress on making the rehabilitation service war ready, noting “rehabilitations and placements have been stepped up, but the limit possible within existing funds has been reached.” By 1 March, 27,000 eligible citizens had registered for rehabilitation, more than had been rehabilitated in any single year before the war, and 7,000 additional people had been referred for rehabilitation in the first two weeks of March, the result of McNutt’s efforts to create synergy between the rehabilitation program and the Employment Service, the Selective Service System, the Red Cross, and state workers’ compensation commissions. McNutt reminded the president that hundreds of disabled veterans were among those who would be waiting for service if additional appropriations were not secured. Finally, he wrote that he would request a small amount of money “to meet the present and pressing emergency” from the Bureau of the Budget until Roosevelt had decided on how he wanted to approach the broader program. The president signed off on the temporary funding, but the Bureau of the Budget requested more time to study McNutt’s original proposal.⁷⁴

Figure 1. War workers install control wires on a BT-13A Valiant airplane. The photograph highlighted the man’s short stature as he worked from inside the small space of the aircraft, next to an average height woman. Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.

Figure 2. Polio survivor Robert H. Drake, photographed in 1942 by the U.S. Office of War Information, operated a drill press in a factory that produced airplane motor parts. The photograph visually recorded Drake’s disability by including his crutches in the background. Photograph by Ann Rosener. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information Photograph Collection.

In July, the Bureau of the Budget and the FSA presented Roosevelt with a concrete plan for new rehabilitation legislation. The plan called for an office of rehabilitation to be housed in the FSA that would be charged with rehabilitating disabled civilians for the manpower crisis, providing rehabilitation for civilians injured in civil defense, and addressing the needs of injured veterans. The plan contemplated offering services to veterans as the VA no longer offered the vocational rehabilitation services that had been available to World War I veterans, and the civilian rehabilitation program offered the only publicly funded vocational rehabilitation services in the nation at the time. The administration’s proposal added “medical services and physical repair, prosthetic appliances and mechanical aids,” to the civilian rehabilitation program’s pre-war services of job training, education, and counseling. The Bureau of the Budget and the FSA proposed to maintain the existing federal-state funding system but aimed to address the reality that states had “unequally developed” programs by giving the FSA the authority to supplement matched funding with federal dollars to strengthen rehabilitation programs in states with underdeveloped rehabilitation agencies.⁷⁵ The Bureau of the Budget cautioned Roosevelt against delay, as “the question of seeking additional emergency funds will continue unabated.” McNutt and budget officials feared that the process of seeking funds would lead to “piecemeal modification of the present legislation” and could “render more difficult the adoption of a sound permanent program.” Moreover, they pointed out that Congress had taken up the issue and that several “inadequate bills” had been proposed.⁷⁶

Figure 3. Photographed by the U.S. Office of War Information in 1942, Belva Fletcher, on the left, and Henriette Furley painted airplane engine parts at the Maryland League for Crippled Children. The original caption noted Fletcher’s progressive paralysis and Furley’s need to stand at work because of arthritis. Photograph by Ann Rosener. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information Photograph Collection.

Indeed, labor shortages, the increased visibility of disability, pressure from disabled veterans for greater employment opportunities, and the need to provide rehabilitation for injured soldiers from the present conflict had pushed Congress into action. Members of both the House and Senate introduced numerous bills, ranging from initiatives to expand Social Security to increased appropriations for the rehabilitation program in 1941 and 1942.⁷⁷

In 1941, Representative Graham Barden (D-NC) had introduced rehabilitation legislation promoted by the National Rehabilitation Association. Founded in 1923, the National Rehabilitation Association, a professional society that represented the interests of workers within civilian rehabilitation, had struggled to keep the program on sure financial footing. While the civilian rehabilitation program had remained small, the organization had grown and positioned itself to play an increasingly important role on the federal legislative front in the 1940s. In 1941, the organization hired an executive director and set up a national office, allowing the National Rehabilitation Association to advocate for growth of the rehabilitation program. Barden’s bill would have increased federal funding for rehabilitation, established a federal office for the program in the FSA, provided rehabilitation for disabled soldiers, expanded the range of services the program could provide, and eased the financial burden on states by reducing states’ matching responsibilities to one dollar for every two spent by the federal government and making the federal government responsible for costs incurred in rehabilitating soldiers and federal employees. While nothing came of his first rehabilitation bill, Barden would continue working on the rehabilitation question, and his initial thoughts on rehabilitation had been shaped by professionals in the field.⁷⁸

Barden’s next rehabilitation bill was the product of the conferences, research, and planning led by the FSA following the president’s request that the agency develop a plan to expand rehabilitation. In August 1942, Barden and Senator Robert La Follette, Jr. (PRG-WI) introduced identical rehabilitation bills in the House and Senate. La Follette, a member of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, had sponsored with Barden legislation to increase rehabilitation appropriations earlier in the year.⁷⁹

In proposing that the FSA be in charge of veterans and civilians vocational rehabilitation, Barden’s second rehabilitation bill, in line with McNutt’s plans for expanding rehabilitation, ruffled feathers in the VA and did not gain the Bureau of the Budget’s approval. In early October 1942, General Frank T. Hines, head of the VA, weighed in on the Barden and La Follette bills, arguing that the VA handled all services for veterans, ranging from hospital care to pensions and other benefits, except employment placement. He told the Senate subcommittee, chaired by La Follette, that the La Follette bill did not have the official backing of the administration and that veterans’ organizations wanted veterans’ rehabilitation to be handled by the VA. Hines agreed with the veterans’ organizations, noting that the VA already assessed veterans’ disabilities and had the necessary information about disabled veterans to develop a training plan. He concluded, “We also know his history pretty well and we should be in a position to at least guide him to the right place for training.” Hines, however, danced a fine line in the hearing, as it was clear that the broader Roosevelt administration favored a plan that would prevent duplication and waste. Despite Hines’s call for VA authority in veterans’ matters, he argued that the federal government “should not, under any circumstances, duplicate training facilities that now exist.” Instead, he maintained that the VA should have the authority to determine whether existing rehabilitation programs were appropriate for individual veterans, “rather than to have some other agency decide that,” the other agency, of course, being the FSA. Essentially, Hines argued that the VA should certify a veteran’s disability and eligibility for services, develop a plan for rehabilitation, but utilize existing rehabilitation and vocational programs to carry out the actual training.⁸⁰

Disabled veterans were more direct. Millard W. Rice, national service director of the DAV, expressed concerns that having disabled veterans rehabilitated by the FSA would set a dangerous precedent of veterans receiving medical care and vocational assistance outside of the VA, arguing that “it might well be the first step in a gradual and logical absorption of the VA into the Federal Security Agency.” Rice maintained that war-disabled individuals should “be kept in a class separate and apart and that they should be treated separate and apart through the Federal agency, which has been designated by Congress to attend to veterans’ matters.” He referenced “the chaos and confusion that existed following the First World War,” prior to the establishment of the VA when five different federal agencies administered some element of veterans’ benefits. Indeed, he argued that the very conditions that La Follette’s bill would re-create had spurred the founding of the DAV. Rice maintained, “The war-disabled veterans should be required to go to only one Federal agency to find out what they are entitled to, as to all benefits, from the Government, on the basis of their status as war-disabled veterans with serviceconnected disabilities.” Moreover, returning veterans, he pointed out, may not wish to return to their home states, that they would be a more mobile group, moving in search of opportunities. The VA would be better equipped to handle a population no longer rooted in a single place.⁸¹

On the other side of the coin, McNutt argued for a single rehabilitation program for all disabled citizens. He maintained that one of the central difficulties of expanding rehabilitation to meet wartime needs would be in recruiting trained rehabilitation counselors. “This shortage,” he concluded, “will be particularly serious if two agencies are separately established.” McNutt suggested that no proposal for rehabilitation, whether for civilians and veterans or veterans alone, would establish new training facilities. Instead, rehabilitation programs would use existing training schools and programs. He noted, “It is, of course, a matter of judgment for the Congress as to whether there shall be an integration of training facilities by one Federal agency or by two Federal agencies.” Downplaying the degree to which a universal rehabilitation program would dispense veterans’ benefits, McNutt suggested, such a program would merely be guaranteeing veterans access to a program open to all disabled citizens even if a veteran’s home state had exhausted annual appropriations or lacked appropriate facilities for the individual’s training plan. But he conceded that the VA should determine eligibility for veterans with service-connected disabilities to “do away with any argument that might come afterward” and noted that training allowances legislated for these disabled veterans would be handled by the VA. Finally, McNutt argued that establishing separate programs for veterans and civilians would “unquestionably hamper the rapid and effective development of the general rehabilitation program which is today so vital.”⁸²

While they were not on the same page about the particulars, McNutt and Hines agreed that the need to expand rehabilitation was a pressing problem. McNutt argued that the need for labor on the home front demanded the “immediate expansion” of the national rehabilitation program, “not as a social gain, but as a wartime necessity.” He referenced the “startling increase in disability”—the threat of civilian casualties in a total war and the reality that the army was discharging thirty-five hundred soldiers a month for disability and that industrial accidents on the home front were mounting in the war economy. Finally, he asserted that rehabilitation, in expanding the nation’s manpower, represented “a direct contribution to wartime activity.”⁸³ Unlike McNutt, Hines’s commitment to rehabilitation focused on the nation’s responsibility to its soldiers and the need to incentivize work over pensions. He maintained that the nation needed a program “to fit [disabled veterans] for gainful employment” and that the lure of a pension should not be greater than the incentive “to complete training and get into employment.”⁸⁴

The need for workers, and soldiers, had grown to such a degree that President Roosevelt spent considerable time on the problem in a fireside chat just days after McNutt and Hines testified before La Follette’s subcommittee. Roosevelt noted that the nation was “becoming one great fighting force,” with each individual—whether a soldier, sailor, or worker—“playing an honorable part in the great struggle to save our democratic civilization.” He said that the war was being fought “in airplanes five miles above the continent of Europe” and “in mines deep down in the earth of Pennsylvania or Montana.” The president painted war production as a central part of the war effort and necessary for victory, yet millions of new workers were needed. Essentially, the fate of the nation hinged on the intertwined problems of developing the nation’s fighting force and producing the weapons and food necessary for victory. A coordinated policy and sacrifice on the part of many, he suggested, would be required. Workers should no longer follow their whims about where to work, employers needed to think of the larger picture when hiring, war-focused production had to replace nonessential work, and more men had to be freed for military service by using “older men, and handicapped people, and more women, and even grown boys and girls, wherever possible and reasonable.” Roosevelt called on Americans to report to the Employment Service to find out where their “skills and labors are needed most” and to be referred “to an employer who can utilize them to best advantage in the war effort.”⁸⁵

Disabled people themselves also expressed their desire to participate in the war effort. The War Production Board, and its predecessor agencies, received around a thousand letters a week from disabled people and friends and family members arguing that the nation, in the midst of war, needed to do more for disabled Americans so that they could do more for their country. Leonard Outhwaite specialized in services for individuals who were difficult to place in jobs, including people with disabilities, for the War Production Board. He would later say that the letters that flooded his office suggested that disabled Americans and the people closest to them “felt that they were entitled to” rehabilitation, that “it was the responsibility of the Federal Government in time of war to do something more for them.”⁸⁶

Both the AFPH and NFB wrote to the Senate committee considering the La Follette measure, urging policymakers to consider the opinions of disabled Americans in their deliberations on rehabilitation policy. The NFB opposed the bill and chastised the committee for failing to include the organization in hearings. The organization argued, “The National Federation of the Blind, consisting of associations of the blind in the several States and being the only national organization of the blind, feels that it has more to contribute in the consideration of such legislation than any other group.” The organization maintained that rehabilitation should be administered by the DOL, using the Employment Service for placement. Any placement that happened through the rehabilitation program on its own, the organization asserted, would “probably consist of placing the blind in [sheltered shops].” Moreover, the NFB lambasted the bill’s reliance on “the sixteenth century pauper-law principle of individual need,” maintaining that “however broadly and literally Congressmen may construe the principle of individual need, our experience has shown that this concept in the hands of administrators and social workers has been narrow, restricted, and even niggardly.” Indeed, blind people’s experience with public assistance informed the NFB’s stance on the La Follette bill. In arguing against FSA leadership of rehabilitation, NFB leaders wrote that the Social Security Board and FSA had “forced a reduction of the standards of public assistance in many States” and had “saddled on the blind of the Nation a demoralizing and humiliating budgetary system by which social workers tyrannize over the lives of the blind.” This perceived tyranny led the NFB to call for “standards, principles, policies, limitations or control upon those who are to administer it” and a policymaking board with blind representatives not selected by the individuals who run rehabilitation. Finally, the NFB argued that the bill should mandate the employment “of a proportion of administrative and clerical workers and of practically all placement workers from among the blind,” declaring that “justice would require that the blind be given employment in an agency for their benefit and much of the work of such an agency could be done properly only if people with experience of blindness were included on the staff.”⁸⁷

The AFPH, still in its early days of organizing and seeking the backing and membership of disabled veterans, wrote to the Senate Committee on Education and Labor in support of VA control of veterans’ rehabilitation. Moreover, the organization used the hearings to reassert its critique of “the lack of intelligent planning” by the federal government to utilize disabled workers’ labor. The AFPH’s national council argued that disabled Americans could and should be used to release physically fit individuals for military service or other war work “requiring full physical strength.” In particular, the AFPH offered a scathing critique of the WMC, the FSA, and the Civil Service Commission, noting that while the FSA sought to take credit for the growing number of disabled individuals in the workforce, the trend was the result of the labor crisis and not due to any “particular effort or design” of the FSA. Despite pressure from the AFPH and other disability rights organizations, the AFPH claimed, Civil Service Commission officials “still stubbornly refuse to map out and put into operation a practical program.” Additionally, the council accused the commission of perpetrating “a fraud upon the handicapped,” by encouraging disabled individuals to take the civil service examination but then refusing to hire them on the grounds of disability.⁸⁸

The AFPH outlined eight key demands in its correspondence with the committee. The organization called for Congress to pass National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week, legislation that had been introduced by Representative Jerry Voorhis (D-CA) and Senator Richard B. Russell (D-GA), and to launch an investigation to gather information about the nation’s response to disability in order to develop “proper and feasible remedies” for the problems confronting disabled Americans and the nation. The national council suggested that such an investigation should result in legislation that “would render more effective service to the handicapped on a scale commensurate with the real size of the job, instead of the ‘piddling’ methods now generally observed.” Additionally, the AFPH demanded a Federal Bureau of Welfare for the Physically Handicapped, staffed as much as possible by disabled citizens, to serve the nation’s disabled population and greater services for people with disabilities in the Civil Service Commission and Employment Service. The AFPH called for “an all-out program of complete education, rehabilitation, including all essential medical care, and appliances, and placement in employment of the physically handicapped.” Finally, the AFPH’s national council staked a claim for the right of disabled individuals to shape their own destinies, arguing that government, at all levels, and private service providers should “afford the physically handicapped representation in all matters in which their interests are at stake.”⁸⁹

While the NFB and AFPH’s concerns did little to shape the direction of federal efforts to expand rehabilitation, VA and veterans’ objections did prompt a rethinking. Initially, Barden had been working with the legislative counsel of the House of Representatives and the FSA drafting counsel. Given the disagreements between the FSA and the VA, the Bureau of the Budget brought in Outhwaite from the War Production Board and Dr. Floyd W. Reeves, a University of Chicago professor who held numerous federal positions during the Roosevelt administration, including a position with the National Resources Planning Board, to study the rehabilitation problem and work with attorneys from the FSA and the VA in drafting legislation. As Barden put it, the Bureau of the Budget “was not in line with me, and I was not in line with the Federal Security, and the veterans were not in line with anybody right at that particular time.” Barden’s third rehabilitation bill would be the “result of many, many conferences and the ideas of all being shaken down and worked out.”⁹⁰

In January 1943, Barden and La Follette introduced new bills that left the VA administrator in control of veterans’ rehabilitation, in an attempt to address veterans’ criticisms. Still, the bills mandated that the VA “as far as practicable, utilize training provided under approved State plans”—essentially the VA would provide medical rehabilitation and assign veterans to rehabilitation training provided by states through the existing, civilian rehabilitation system.⁹¹

The change did little to halt veterans’ protests. Senator Joel Clark (D-MO) argued the bill’s history had to be considered. In its initial form, he said, it “absolutely and boldly raped the Veterans’ Administration of any jurisdiction over veterans’ rehabilitation.” Clark’s use of the imagery of rape suggested both the gravity of veterans’ objections and their outrage at being stripped of their privileged identity as veterans and the powerlessness that being treated as ordinary citizens would entail. Given the bill’s initial stance on the VA’s role in rehabilitation, Clark maintained that he and other veterans “feared that if the two problems are linked together”—the need for veterans’ rehabilitation and an expanded civilian program—“there will be a repetition of such an attempt.”⁹²

The DAV, the American Legion, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) all denounced the bill. Omar B. Ketchum, national legislative representative of the VFW, explained that his organization had no objection to civilians receiving rehabilitation, but that they were “unalterably opposed” to the idea that a single bill could address the needs of veterans and civilians. American Legion members flooded Congress with a wave of opposition letters. Senator Clark, himself a World War I veteran, complained that the bill tangled “the special rights of the veterans” with the question of the federal government’s obligation to civilians. For their part, Representative Barden and Senator La Follette argued that a program that addressed the needs of both civilians and veterans made sense given the vital link between military success and industrial production. The labor of disabled civilians, they maintained, would be necessary for victory, but this labor would be lost without an expanded rehabilitation program. Moreover, in a total war, the nation had to be ready to rehabilitate men and women injured on the battlefield and home front by enemy attack or on the production lines. Finally, they sold the new rehabilitation program as a cost-saving efficiency measure, reasoning that a single rehabilitation bill would reduce waste and duplication and save money. Efficiency, savings, and arguments that workers were as necessary to victory as soldiers, however, did not convince a Congress wary of any action that might be construed as threatening “the special rights of veterans.” In the end, La Follette and Barden removed the provisions for dealing with veterans’ rehabilitation from their bills. The House and the Senate passed a separate veteran rehabilitation bill in March, which the president quickly signed into law.⁹³

When the House and the Senate returned to the issue of civilian rehabilitation, the question of veterans’ rights continued to impede progress. Barden and La Follette had removed the major provisions for veterans from the measure, but Barden sought to ensure their access to the civilian program in case they did not qualify for VA assistance, which would be the case for veterans with disabilities not certified as service-connected. He sought to compel states that accepted federal funds through the civilian program to cooperate with the VA if the agency wanted to use their services in rehabilitating veterans. Ketchum argued that veterans were being used “for sugar-coating purposes and to gain support of the bill by appearing to favor veterans.” He charged that the bill referenced veterans twice unnecessarily, once giving the program authority to work cooperatively with the VA to support veterans’ rehabilitation and again by opening the program to veterans with disabilities not connected to service-related injuries. As citizens, disabled veterans not eligible for services from the VA would be eligible for rehabilitation through the civilian program, whether they were referenced in the bill or not. Ketchum concluded if the sponsors wanted to serve veterans, they would give them preference in obtaining services. Short of that, he argued, they should not be mentioned at all. Representative William Jennings Miller (R-CT), a disabled World War I veteran, pointed out that state directors of the civilian program “would like by hook or by crook to bring under their control the training of disabled veterans” to make the task of securing state appropriations easier. After much debate and further evidence of the displeasure of veterans’ organizations, Barden yielded and removed veterans from the bill entirely.⁹⁴

Aside from the jurisdictional controversy over veterans, several congressmen raised questions over states’ rights and on federal spending. In the 1940s, policymakers marshaled states’ rights arguments both to push back against the tremendous growth of the federal government under the New Deal and defend the South’s Jim Crow system. In the case of rehabilitation policy, both sides of the states’ rights coin mattered. In anticipation of states’ rights-based opposition to any federal expansion of disability policy, many supporters of the bill offered arguments that sought to distinguish the program from New Deal social policy and reassure states’ rights proponents. As Committee on Education members from both sides of the aisle argued for the bill on the floor of the House, Representative George Dondero (R-MI) noted that he, like Barden who chaired the committee, believed the measure was “a States’ rights bill.” Another committee member, Representative Charles Vursell (R-IL) argued, “When this bill came to us it had a good many ideas promulgated there that drifted away from the protection of the States. During some 30 days the 21 members of this committee attempted at all times to curb the power of the Government, not to extend bureaucracy but to retard its onward march in this country.” Vursell also claimed that the bill represented “legislation of economy,” in that it would position disabled people “to get off the financial back of the National Government,” a prospect that would have resonated with policymakers frustrated with New Deal state growth. Physician and committee member Walter Judd (R-MN) addressed concerns about extending aid programs and increasing national dependency, fears that shaped New Deal opposition. He distinguished rehabilitation, which would help disabled people “to acquire productive capacity or earning power, so they can be independent and self-sustaining” from programs that would make people with disabilities “objects of charity,” which would cause them to lose “self-respect” and become “victim[s] of pauperization and paternalism.”⁹⁵

Still, the assurances did not stop questions about how the bill might change the relationship between states and the federal government. Representative Henry O. Talle (R-IA) questioned whether the bill’s liberalization of federal funding—the federal government covered all administrative costs, while states received one-to-one matching grants for other costs—would “deprive the States of any power they now have.” William Blackney (R-MI) expressed concern whether the bill grew out of “the apparent policy on the part of the Federal Government to encroach on the educational policies of the States.” Others criticized the fact that the committee had removed the limit on federal funding in the original act.⁹⁶

An amendment to ban discrimination “on account of race, creed, or color” in the program, proposed on the House floor by Earle Willey (R-DE), shone light on the other side of the states’ rights coin. Representative John E. Rankin (D-MS), himself having led the charge against the bill on veterans’ issues, railed, “this amendment would just kill the bill. If the gentleman wants to destroy this legislation, that is the way to do it.” Barden also objected to the amendment claiming, “There has never been the slightest inference of any discrimination.” He argued that legislating protections for African Americans would unfairly portray the program as discriminatory. Debate over the amendment was short, and it failed to pass. But the response to the amendment revealed how the fight for states’ rights was also about protecting the South’s system of separate and unequal. Despite these challenges and questions, the bill passed both the House and Senate in June, and President Roosevelt signed the bill into law in July 1943.⁹⁷

Taken together, Public Law 16, which established the new veterans’ vocational rehabilitation program, and the Barden-La Follette Act, aimed at addressing key war crises, discharging the debt owed to disabled veterans, and addressing the country’s labor shortage. Moreover, rehabilitation had the potential to extend the New Deal promise of opportunity, employment, and security to Americans with disabilities. Yet, by separating veterans as a special class of citizens, these laws perpetuated divides in disability policy based on how, and whether, one earned access to federal assistance.

Vice Admiral Ross T. McIntire, Surgeon General and Chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery of the Navy, argued that the VA rehabilitation program sought to help the disabled veteran understand that “he should be a useful citizen and make his way, earning his living,” instead of existing on a pension. The program worked to give the veteran the tools to become that productive citizen.⁹⁸ On the whole, Public Law 16 aimed to make veterans with service-connected disabilities employable. To be eligible for services under the new law, veterans had to have served after the attack on Pearl Harbor, been honorably discharged, and have a disability from or aggravated by service that limited the individual’s vocational prospects. Any injury or aggravation of an injury sustained during VA occupational training counted as a battle injury for pension purposes. The VA provided counseling, drawing on veterans’ previous education, experiences, disability, wishes, and available programs. It then assigned veterans to training courses at universities and other educational facilities and used on-the-job-training programs offered by businesses; however, the VA limited educational funding to four years. During their time in a rehabilitation program, veterans received an eightydollar a month pension, with increases for married veterans and those supporting children or parents. Veterans could also receive pay through on-job-training programs, provided that a veteran’s combined pension and training pay did not exceed the typical pay for fully trained individuals in the veteran’s field. Additionally, the VA covered the cost of tuition, books, supplies, and equipment, while disabled trainees could receive loans of up to one hundred dollars for incidental expenses not covered by the program. Veterans who completed rehabilitation training received additional financial support for two months as they looked for jobs.⁹⁹

The Barden-La Follette Act sought to prime the civilian rehabilitation program to contribute to the pressing needs of the wartime economy. In so doing, however, policymakers put in motion a longer-term transformation of the program that would contribute to the growth of the disability rights movement. The expanded civilian rehabilitation program aimed to provide “all services necessary to render disabled persons capable of engaging in remunerative employment, or of becoming more advantageously employed, on a normal competitive basis.” The pressing needs of the wartime economy led lawmakers to liberalize services available to disabled citizens, allowing federal funds to be used for “the physical reconstruction of the handicapped so that they can as nearly as possible approximate normal work capacity.” It also extended rehabilitation to people with mental illness and intellectual disabilities and made psychiatric care available both to people with mental disabilities and those “with physical disabilities complicated by the presence of psychiatric difficulties.”¹⁰⁰

War needs also encouraged policymakers to shift more of the financial burden for the program to the federal government. They removed the fixed ceiling on federal appropriations, and the federal government covered all state administrative costs, which essentially meant that the federal government paid the full cost of providing vocational guidance and counseling. Medical and training costs were shared on a matching basis—one federal dollar for every state dollar, except in specific cases where the federal government committed to covering the full cost: civilians disabled in the conflict, including merchant seamen, and federal employees injured on the job. The day-to-day business of rehabilitation remained with the states, and states continued to place individuals accepted for rehabilitation into existing training programs through public and private schools and in on-the-job training programs with established companies. Medical services were to be obtained through local physicians.¹⁰¹

The civilian program worked closely with the Employment Service; state education, welfare, agriculture, and workers’ compensation agencies; “Crippled Children’s Societies”; the American Red Cross; and a range of community members and service organizations, from doctors to churches, to identify potential clients. An applicant would receive medical examinations “to determine eligibility and to link his capacities with the physical demands of jobs” and “a vocational diagnosis” after completing various aptitude tests and interviews to determine past education, work experiences, and interests. Throughout the process, rehabilitation workers sought to help the client “understand his assets and liabilities, the causes of his present problems, and the steps necessary to correct these difficulties.” “Physical reconstruction,” if it would significantly reduce the individuals “employment handicap,” followed for individuals deemed eligible and feasible for rehabilitation. Medical rehabilitation services could include a wide range of medical, psychiatric, surgical, convalescent, hospital, and dental care; therapy; and prosthetics, drugs, and other medical supplies. Once “physical reconstruction” was complete, clients pursued training, and rehabilitation counselors assisted them with job placement.¹⁰²

Rehabilitation represented a medical- and means-tested form of aid. Applicants had to be disabled enough that rehabilitation would “reduce substantially or eliminate the employment handicaps” and yet able-bodied enough that physicians viewed their physical and mental condition as “relatively stable and remediable.” Essentially, rehabilitation was not meant to provide “long-term care for chronic illness,” and indeed, hospital care was limited to ninety days. Disabled people’s attitudes also figured into the determination of eligibility and feasibility. As Michael J. Shortley, director of the new U.S. Office of Vocational Rehabilitation (OVR), put it, “there must be a sense of directed objective, which is ‘hope’ expressed in another way.” All those determined to be eligible received counseling, training, and placement at no cost. Financial need opened the door to medical services, financial support during rehabilitation, and assistance with supplies and other training materials.¹⁰³

While disability activists demanded the right to shape federal services, the OVR instead turned to a range of professionals for advice in developing the expanded program. The office established two new advisory committees. The first, the National Rehabilitation Advisory Council, was “composed of outstanding representatives of business and industry, labor, education, medicine, services to the blind, social welfare, and other interests closely allied to the problems of rehabilitation.” The second, the National Professional Advisory Committee, brought physicians more directly into the program. This committee advised “on matters of professional policy in the general operation of the program” and provided “technical recommendations for physical restoration services.”¹⁰⁴ Though this expanded program offered disabled citizens greater services and opportunities, the fact that it reified the power of medical professionals and ignored disabled citizens’ calls for the right to shape its administration would contribute to the growing wave of disability rights activism.

World War II was a moment of promise and consequence for people with disabilities. The booming war economy breathed life into the New Deal promises of opportunity, security, and work for people with disabilities. Indeed, people with disabilities clamored to work, serve the nation on the home front, and contribute to victory, and policymakers worked to secure them space in the wartime economy. Rehabilitation and a host of federal efforts to bring disabled people into the workforce represented a federal promise of inclusion—the promise of salvaging people.

In seeking to shore up the gaps in the no-man’s land of state and federal aid policy that made it difficult for people with disabilities to contribute to the war effort, however, policymakers set in motion a medicalization of disability policy. More than additional funding, World War II rehabilitation policy redefined the program, opening the door to a range of medical services to support the transformation of dependents to workers.

In the short term, the rehabilitation bureaucracy would focus on immediate results, growing the wartime workforce. In the long term, the growth of the rehabilitation bureaucracy would further mark people with disabilities as others. Individuals who sought rehabilitation would encounter a growing body of experts who would dictate the terms of their inclusion into the workforce and the broader boundaries of citizenship. Physicians and a range of rehabilitation experts would increasingly claim expertise over people with disabilities, arguing that disabled people needed their specialized knowledge, and presumably their supervision, to be prepared for and placed in jobs. Moreover, much as Strachan had predicted, the Barden-La Follette Act never came close to covering the gap.

Both the promise and consequence of the war would explode into the disability rights movement. In the years to come, AFPH members and leaders along with other disability activists would fight to shine a light on that no-man’s land of public aid that had shaped “New York’s 100 Neediest Cases” and colored the realities of everyday life for Americans with disabilities. They would demand that the state make full citizenship accessible to people with physical disabilities through a range of policies that would support disabled people’s access to the workplace, better educational opportunities, health care, and improved medical treatments as well as their physical access to public spaces. Further, disability activists would demand that people with disabilities define and shape these policies, challenging the growing authority of a range of experts in the rehabilitation bureaucracy.