Out of the Horrors of War. Audra Jennings
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rehabilitation movement’s emphasis on work suggests that disabled dependency had also grown increasingly problematic. Work served as the defining characteristic of male citizenship, and willingness to work divided the deserving from the undeserving poor. In this framework, rehabilitationists, as historian Brad Byrom suggests, viewed disabled dependents as “the antithesis of American citizenship.”22 Finding ways to put disabled men to work would push back this unspoken challenge to American citizenship while also solving the economic problem of supporting disabled Americans.
In 1952, AFPH vice president J. Rosemond Cook, Jr., wrote that the AFPH had been born amid “the troubles and terrors” of World War II—a moment of promise and consequence for disabled people.23 The war, I argue, made disability particularly visible to policymakers and infused it with greater consequences for the nation and a new sense of urgency. It also enabled the rise of a national, cross-disability social movement by creating a new sense of what was possible for people with disabilities.
The necessities of war brought the New Deal promise within the reach of disabled people. While recovery proved elusive during the 1930s, the New Deal, through a stunning array of legislative and executive actions, fundamentally changed Americans’ expectations of the federal government. President Franklin D. Roosevelt engaged the federal government in an unprecedented effort to provide Americans with direct relief, jobs, and longterm protection against the uncertainties of unemployment, old age, and widowhood. In 1941, he equated the health of a nation with its ability to provide: “Equality of opportunity for youth and for others. Jobs for those who can work. Security for those who need it.”24
Yet during the Depression years that New Deal promise—of opportunity, work, and security—was empty for many Americans. New Dealers drew a line between those who should have the guarantee of work and those who could not or should not work, and thus receive aid, by legislating the promise of work to some and relief to others. The drawing of this line, in many respects, had little to do with the individual’s desires or citizen status and more to do with prevailing notions about the “appropriate” structure of families, men’s and women’s roles within the family, race, and class. In this dichotomy of work and relief, which political scientist Barbara J. Nelson argues created a “two-channel welfare state,” able-bodied white men should be guaranteed work, and others with no breadwinner to rely upon should receive aid.25 By instituting these divides, the New Deal intensified the already profound cultural meanings assigned to work and dependence. Moreover, exclusion from work had growing repercussions as New Deal policy linked social rights such as old age pensions and unemployment insurance to work.26 Furthermore, as Fraser and Gordon have shown, the New Deal further heightened the stigma attached to aid and dependency. Whereas work entitled citizens to the benefits of social insurance, relief, or unearned aid, carried with it the indignities of means and morals tests and supervision.27 Scholars have built on, extended, and critiqued this model, providing a more nuanced view of the state’s inclusions and exclusions.28 Examining how the state managed disability enriches this conversation. Disability is simultaneously another binary in a matrix of inclusion and exclusion and yet transcends the typical boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, cutting across distinctions based on race, gender, and class. Disability shaped work-earned entitlements, veterans’ benefits, and the aid programs most often considered welfare.
Despite President Roosevelt’s own disability, the New Deal state had both reflected and reinforced notions of fitness for employment that drew on assumptions that disabled people could or should not work. The Social Security Act provided grants to the states to support relief payments to needy blind citizens and increased funding for the civilian rehabilitation program. With the Aid to the Blind program and an expansion of rehabilitation policy, the New Deal underscored disabled people’s exclusion. Even in rehabilitation, a program designed to help people with disabilities return to work, the state marked disabled people as others who required aid, instruction, and assistance—presumably from an able-bodied individual—to work. Essentially, the program sought to help the individual conform to social expectations, leaving intact and perhaps even fortifying able-bodied privilege.
U.S. involvement in World War II necessitated state action to draw the New Deal promise within reach for disabled Americans. While the nation’s factories took up the task of supplying Allied troops with the tools of war, millions of young men left the factory floor and headed to the front lines. Labor shortages rapidly replaced unemployment as the economic concern of the nation, and the need for workers pushed the federal government to develop policies to support and encourage the employment of people with disabilities. Just as the needs of the wartime economy challenged gendered and racial prescriptions about work, physical fitness as an abstract prerequisite for work fell by the wayside, and a vast majority of the nation’s factories put disabled workers on their payrolls.29
World War II catalyzed disability activism by facilitating the dramatic influx of people with disabilities into the workforce, fostering a sense that individual rights were at the heart of American identity, and linking war work and volunteer activities on the home front to victory. In the context of the war and fascism, American patriotism focused around a notion of individual rights. Those rights set the United States and Americans apart from their enemies, and those rights fueled the drive to protect and celebrate the nation and became central to how Americans understood citizenship and what it meant to be an American. As people with disabilities responded to the nation’s call for manpower, many gained opportunities that had been closed to them before the war. Alone, this experience might have shifted disabled individuals’ expectations for the postwar economy and of the state, but wartime propaganda infused this working experience with deeper meaning. In linking war work and volunteerism with victory and patriotism, propaganda suggested that people with disabilities who had helped on the home front were serving the nation, helping to protect a range of rights, not all of which people with disabilities could themselves enjoy.
World War II also created an acute public awareness of disability. Everywhere, it seemed, the nation confronted disability. Reflecting on his experience managing the nation’s draft, Major General Lewis B. Hershey, director of the Selective Service System, painted a grim portrait of the physical and mental condition of the nation. More than five million young men had been found physically, mentally, or emotionally unfit for service—a fact Hershey believed “should give citizens of America cause for alarm.” World War II, and the need for soldiers and laborers, served as a lens that brought disability into clear focus. “It is quite useless,” Hershey said, “to talk of democracy and the acceptance of equal obligation by all our citizens when a very considerable proportion of these citizens are unable to carry out their civic obligations.”30 Hershey’s bleak testimony not only suggests the persistence of (dis)ability in defining citizenship but also the way the war made disability visible and rendered it urgent.
With the grim realities discovered by the Selective Service, labor campaigns that drew hundreds of thousands of disabled Americans into the workforce, an astonishing accident rate that produced each year during the war on the home front more than two million workplace accidents that caused at least a temporary disability, and the specter of the disabled veteran, the war provoked a new and powerful awareness of disability.31 In 1945, a House joint resolution suggested that the “problem” of disability would “be more severe at the conclusion of World War II than at any other period in the history of our country.”32 Policymakers understood disability as a “problem” because of its perceived power to disrupt and strain the structures and relationships that tied citizens to the state—employer and employee, husband and wife, and family and child. AFPH leaders recognized the potential of this visibility and urgency. Indeed, AFPH president Strachan often pointed to insight he had gained during World War I from a fellow organized labor legislative representative that unions would secure gains in disability policy only when “the horrors of disablement” of the war were fresh in people’s minds.33
The history of the AFPH challenges existing narratives of the disability rights movement and our understanding of twentieth-century American social movements. I join with numerous scholars whose work, as historian Felicia Kornbluh has described it, “interrupts a metanarrative of civil rights struggles in the twentieth century