Out of the Horrors of War. Audra Jennings
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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