Out of the Horrors of War. Audra Jennings

      Introduction

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

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

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

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

      In discovering that Pennsylvania law prevented her from fulfilling a calling toward which she had worked and for which she felt able, Mildred Scott began to understand that society imposed limits on her beyond any physical limitation associated with her disability. Disability was imbued with social consequences and meaning that extended far beyond the lasting physical, mental, or intellectual consequences of disease, accident, or birth defect. Scott’s personal experiences speak to this larger story, not just of the organization she helped to run, but of American society, law, and the state. Disability is, and has always been, evolving, defined variously by religious leaders, physicians, policymakers, philanthropists, social workers, and disabled people themselves. Scholars in the fields of disability studies and history have come to understand disability as a social construction and a powerful tool for understanding