A Disability History of the United States (23 page)

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

Just as previous wars had furthered public discussion about the employment, assistance needs, gender roles, and rights of disabled citizens, so did World War II. After World War I, Congress had passed legislation providing vocational training for disabled veterans. In 1920 the Smith-Fess Act established similar vocational training programs for disabled civilians. The Barden-LaFollette Act of 1943 expanded these efforts substantially, providing manual vocational training, higher-education opportunities, and physical rehabilitation services.
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Underlying the creation of such programs, and postwar educational and employment policies in general, were debates about the role of government and citizenship rights. Were people with disabilities entitled to employment? Was disability a question of charity? Could employers restrict employees based on disability, race, and sex? What obligation did the nation have toward creating and guaranteeing its citizens equal access to education, housing, and/or employment? In 1944 Great Britain adopted a quota policy, in which employers with more than twenty employees were required to have a workforce of which at least 3 percent were people with disabilities. This idea was never broached seriously in the United States. In the early 1940s, when some in Congress attempted to pass legislation prohibiting employment discrimination against people with disabilities, the idea was quickly shot down.
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Paul Strachan and the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH), a cross-disability activist organization, pushed the argument that people with disabilities had civil rights that included access to employment, education, and all of society. From today’s perspective, and at first glance, it is easy to dismiss Strachan’s views as simplistic. He tends to be remembered as the father of the National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week, signed into existence by President Truman in 1945.

Strachan, however, understood disability as a rights issue—not one of social welfare or the individual. Rather than focusing on individuals and their emotional and physical “adjustment” to disability (which the emerging rehabilitation profession did), he urged policies and programs that focused on social structures and the ways in which they excluded people with disabilities. Disability, he argued, was a class and labor issue. Economic security—either through employment or a reliable pension program for those unable to work—was vital. For example, he urged that people with disabilities be given low-cost loans for educational and housing purposes, just as veterans had received, so that they might live independently. He urged an employment quota program, a form of affirmative action for people with disabilities, as Britain had adopted.
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In 1940 Strachan used his experiences as a labor organizer to found the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH), the first national cross-disability activist organization. Though active in the Deaf community (and despite the opposition of some in Deaf activist organizations), Strachan insisted that the AFPH embrace people with a variety of disabilities—“the blind, deaf, hard-of-hearing, those with cardiac conditions, those with tuberculosis, arthritics, epileptics, those with poliomyelitis, those with cerebral palsy, amputees, and diabetics.” “WHY, oh WHY,” Strachan asked, “is it that there still exists this unreasoning, unjust prejudice against millions of Handicapped people? Why cannot Industry, and the public, generally, realize that we, too, aspire to the comforts, the feeling of security that comes from fair recognition of our rights, as citizens, and our needs, as Handicapped?” As historian Audra Jennings characterizes it, “the AFPH saw unemployment and economic insecurity brought on by discrimination hiring practices and a piecemeal, disorganized federal-state disability program as the core problems faced by people with disabilities.” Much of its funding came from labor unions, which knew that disability was an issue for US workers. The organization also urged building accessibility policies, and better prevention of disability through better worker safety and public health. Just as importantly, its members enjoyed each other’s company at picnics, sporting events, card parties, and even in marriages. By 1946 the AFHP had groups in eighty-nine cities.
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Strachan’s campaigns exemplify the ways in which disability and labor activism intersected in the post–World War II period. Strachan, the AFPH, the Department of Labor, and organized labor worked together to advocate federal disability policies that stressed secure wage employment as the best means to guarantee quality of life for people with disabilities and their families. They argued against medical rehabilitation and needs-based charity services that focused exclusively on altering the individual, rather than altering social and employer attitudes. They also argued that the Department of Labor understood employment issues and the job market far better than the Federal Security Administration.

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

For example, in 1946 Major General Graves B. Erskine, formerly commander of the US Marines at Iwo Jima, and by then employed at the Department of Labor, and Secretary of Labor Leslie Schwellenbach, joined cause with Strachan. Erskine pointed out that 83 percent of industries had employed people with disabilities during the war, with “a smaller labor turnover among these workers, less absenteeism, and equal or higher production rates.” Now, those disabled “from the war and those from war industry” were being forgotten, and “there is a very noticeable tendency to slight the disabled worker in favor of the worker with no disability.” Not only that, he went on, but during June of that year, the current rehabilitation employment services had placed only one out of every twenty-one disabled veterans in secure employment. Schwellenbach called attention to the 250,000 unemployed disabled veterans. “Many of these men,” he said, “are the bravest of the brave. That they should suffer from discrimination or selfishness on the part of the employers is the rankest injustice. Labor, industry, and every private citizen must be made aware of the sorry facts and figures.”
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In 1952 Strachan resigned from the President’s Committee that sponsored the National Employment of the Physically Handicapped Week. He’d had enough. The committee, he wrote in frustration, “was filling up . . . with a lot of ‘do-gooders, social welfare workers, and the like,’ most of whom, we, the Handicapped, know, from bitter experience, ‘WILL DO ANYTHING IN THE WORLD FOR THE HANDICAPPED, EXCEPT,
GET OFF OUR BACKS!’
” Despite the continued efforts of the AFPH and organized labor, a medical-based approach to disability continued to dominate federal policies and programs. The FSA and then later the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare had control of disability services—not the Department of Labor.
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Another group promoting a departure from understanding disability as a personal and physical tragedy in the period following World War II was the Blind Veterans Association. Approximately fourteen hundred servicemen were blinded during the war, either due to combat, disease, or accident. The BVA was founded in 1945, largely by blind veterans who had shared experiences of hospitalization and rehabilitation programs. Like the AFPH, the organization advocated for better rehabilitation and employment programs, involvement and the leadership of blind people in such programs, and better physical accessibility. Russell Williams, one of the BVA founders, went on to establish one of the most rigorous mobility and independent-living training programs for blind people to that date. While in general blind veterans “had fewer interactions with blind people and more sighted friends than did the civil blind of their generation,” and often rejected use of a white cane in favor of the arm of their sighted wives, the BVA and the rehabilitation program organized by Williams at the Hines, Illinois, Veterans Administration hospital encouraged mobility independence, use of a white cane, and employment.
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Like the AFPH, the BVA used the language of discrimination and rights.

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

Historians David Gerber and Robert Jefferson both argue that by wrestling with their own internal ableism as they went through rehabilitation and reintegration into community life, by rejecting the stigma often connected to disability, black and white blind veterans in the BVA came to understand the connection between race and disability. As Jefferson puts it, “They understood race and disability to be social markers used to justify social and political inequality between groups, rather than as markers of personal tragedy and insult.” While simplified, the 1951 novel
Lights Out
(situated at Old Farms Convalescent Hospital in Connecticut, where most of the BVA founders had gathered) tells the story of this learning experience. Later made into a film, the story is based on the experiences of blinded veteran Larry Niven. Niven was forced to confront his own prejudices after realizing that a fellow blinded GI, Joe Morgan, whom he had embraced as a friend, was an African American. Simultaneously wrestling with his ableist despair over losing his sight, and his racist rejection of a fellow veteran, Niven eventually renews his friendship with Morgan and together the men learn to live successfully with their blindness.
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In the decades immediately following World War II, the ideology and language of rights, discrimination, and citizenship increasingly dominated discussions of disability. In disability organizations, in religious institutions, in labor unions, and with respect to the issues of racial and gender equality, people with disabilities increasingly rejected the idea that they had either to adapt to or withdraw from society. Instead, they argued, ableist ideologies that viewed people with disabilities as inherently undesirable and deficient, and that underlay social policy, employment practices, architecture, cultural attitudes, and education, needed to change. Prejudice and discrimination was not acceptable.
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Disability activists also inched toward two important and new ideological positions that would make organizing and activism far more effective. Slowly and haltingly, activists began to argue that people with disabilities shared common experiences of stigma and discrimination, across a wide spectrum of disability. Some began to claim that creating hierarchies among disabilities may have benefited a few, those who could claim that they were not the
truly disabled
and thus should not be discriminated against or ostracized, but justified and reinforced ableist ideology generally. Activists also began to explore the relationship between ableism, sexism, and racism. As the Blind Veterans Association began to learn, rejecting hierarchy based on one form of physical difference (like disability) while embracing hierarchy based on another form of physical difference (such as race) left one ideologically (and perhaps ethically) inconsistent and made organizing less effective. Both of these lessons, however, were hard to learn. Racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and ableism were hard to unlearn—and continued to hinder cross-disability organizing.

These intellectual and organizational moves set the stage for the disability rights movement that developed over the next several decades.