Out of the Horrors of War. Audra Jennings
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shape the AFPH and disability activism more broadly in the mid-twentieth century.
In the Context of War
The AFPH grew rapidly as people with disabilities sought opportunities to contribute to the war efforts on the home front, participate in the prosperity fueled by the war economy, and claim rights from the state as it sought their service in meeting the production needs of war. Between August 1942 and May 1945, the organization grew from the small, committed group who founded it and secured a charter to an organization with around 2,000 dues-paying members. The AFPH had established some sixty chapters and recruited members in every state before the war ended.10
As Martin’s testimony suggests, the AFPH represented people with physical disabilities. The distinction helped to define the movement’s strategies, claims, and goals, and perhaps limited its transformative potential. In arguing for people with physical disabilities’ working and citizenship capacity, members often highlighted their abilities in comparison to people with intellectual disabilities. In so doing, they defined their citizenship claims in opposition to people with intellectual and cognitive disabilities, implying that the exclusion of one group was unjust and the other just. Historian Douglas C. Baynton maintains, “When categories of citizenship were questioned, challenged, and disrupted, disability was called on to clarify and define who deserved, and who was deservedly excluded from, citizenship.”11 AFPH members did not fully challenge a system of exclusion based on disability. Instead, they challenged a system of exclusion based on physical disability.
In 1944, Strachan told members that organization was the key to progress for people with disabilities and countering the “political indifference and ignorance on the part of the great mass of people.” He warned against focusing too much attention on local issues. Organizations of people with disabilities, he argued, floundered when “they persist in seeing things only in their immediate neighborhood; they persist in thinking entirely in terms of local problems; we must think in terms of the Nation.”12 As Strachan’s speech suggests, the AFPH’s developing agenda sought to position disability as a national problem—no longer a problem solely of families, communities, charities, and local and state governments but one of national significance requiring federal action.
Organizationally, the AFPH drew on that message of the importance of national politics, tapped into existing, local networks of people with disabilities, and worked to broaden and politicize those networks. For example, participants in a swimming class for disabled men and women at the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Young Women’s Christian Association had formed a club, the Keystone Arrow Club, in the spring of 1941. In May 1943, a national AFPH officer attended a club meeting, and the group that had begun around a swimming class voted to become an AFPH chapter. The national AFPH’s presence at that May 1943 meeting drew George Lehr, Jr., to the event. Lehr, a disabled veteran of World War I, served as personnel director of Pennsylvania’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles, and through his status as a disabled veteran, his involvement in the new Harrisburg AFPH chapter would expand the group’s organizational reach to include disabled veterans and government networks.13
In other cases, the AFPH offered a national network for local disability organizations already politically and economically engaged. Harold J. McMahon of Buffalo, New York, would become a national vice president of the AFPH, but his organizational work in Buffalo, before and after the AFPH was founded, had primed the city’s residents to be active members in a national movement. McMahon’s personal experiences shaped his work in Buffalo. As a young man he had developed osteomyelitis, a bone infection, and lost his left leg above the knee and a bone in his left arm; he also nearly lost his right leg. After recovering, McMahon worked in the printing trade, holding numerous positions from work in the composing room to sales. During World War I, he worked in a war plant outside of New York City. McMahon convinced his employer that other people with disabilities could meet the factory’s labor demands, and the factory eventually hired sixty disabled workers. After the war, McMahon returned to the printing industry. A few years later, however, he visited the plant where he had worked during the war to discover that all the disabled folks he had worked with there had “been discarded and replaced by able-bodied people.” That experience stuck with McMahon, but another sharpened the feeling that he had to do something to improve the opportunities for people with disabilities. He recalled seeing a bread line in Philadelphia in 1930 and realizing that nine of the thirty people in line had visible disabilities. That breadline, he later said, represented a truth he had known for some time: “the handicapped worker is always the last hired and the first fired.” McMahon decided that freedom from charity and public aid would come through organization of businesses owned by people with disabilities.14
Even as defense industries expanded and industry faced labor shortages, McMahon moved forward with his plan to establish a factory managed and run by disabled people, noting “I could not help but believe that these handicapped boys and girls who had been hired in defense plants would be the first to be dismissed as soon as war production ceases.” He also recognized that many disabled people remained unemployed even as factories were desperate for workers. The war economy presented both challenges and opportunities for McMahon’s idea. Regulations designed to increase defense production limited available materials for consumer goods, but because many factories had shifted from consumer to defense production, there was an opening in the market. In the summer of 1942, he launched the Toymakers Guild, a division of his broader company, Handicapped Persons Industries, Inc., to produce wooden toys. McMahon recruited other successful disabled individuals to serve on the board, ranging from teachers to a master watchmaker, a housewife, and a defense worker. The group designed toys, produced samples, and secured $100,000 in orders at a toy fair in New York City.15
McMahon and the board of Handicapped Persons Industries, Inc., employed individuals from the relief rolls, all deemed not feasible for rehabilitation by the civilian rehabilitation program. The first twenty-one people he hired had spent a combined total of 125 years existing on meager public aid and private charity. Handicapped Persons Industries, Inc., paid workers full wages, despite the fact that the Fair Labor Standards Act allowed employers to pay people with disabilities less than the minimum wage. McMahon also ensured that his employees had access to Social Security benefits and were paid time and a half for overtime work.16 Through Handicapped Persons Industries, Inc., and McMahon’s organizing efforts, Buffalo’s disabled citizens had already begun to demand something more than charity, and the AFPH’s message of justice, opportunity, and equal rights found an eager constituency.
By the end of 1942, the AFPH’s national campaign for legislation was underway. In June 1942, Representative Jerry Voorhis (D-CA) had introduced a joint resolution to establish National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week (NEPHW), Strachan’s plan for a formal public education campaign.17 The AFPH had also begun the drive for a federal investigation of the needs of Americans with disabilities and the aid programs that benefitted them. Voorhis told AFPH members that such a committee “would be the means of focusing public attention” on the problems people with disabilities faced, reveal their needs, and contribute to “the formulation of a national policy.” Additionally, the organization had begun to develop plans for a federal agency for disabled individuals, a federal ban on employment discrimination, representation in government agencies serving people with disabilities, and mandates for special services through the U.S. Civil Service Commission and U.S. Employment Service.18 By 1944, the AFPH had found sponsors for four different bills. In the House, the AFPH got two different bills introduced: one, instructing the Committee on Labor to “investigate, survey, and develop a national program for all the physically handicapped,” and another that would have established a personal catastrophe loan system. The organization succeeded in finding sponsors in both the House and Senate for bills to establish NEPHW and to create a division in the Employment Service for disabled job seekers.19
The House of Representatives voted to launch the AFPH proposed investigation in June 1944. The resolution directed the Committee on Labor “to conduct thorough studies and investigation of the extent and character of aid now given by the Federal, State, and local governments and private agencies to the physically handicapped” and “employment opportunities” to “aid the Congress in any necessary remedial legislation.” It