Out of the Horrors of War. Audra Jennings
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and access Selective Service System, War Manpower Commission, and Bureau of the Census records.20
As chair of the Committee on Rules, Representative Adolph Sabath D-IL) introduced the measure for consideration, noting his support and that he had “received a very large number of communications, telegrams, and resolutions from nearly every section of the United States favoring the passage of this worthy resolution.” While promoted by Democrats, Republicans, including the minority leader Joseph Martin (R-MA), also expressed approval. The AFPH figured in the discussion on the House floor. Henderson Carson (R-OH) contended, “It is imperative that we immediately plan a national program to provide a cushion against the unhappy days of post-war chaos and possible unemployment and want which a large number of these people have experienced in the past.” He noted that people with disabilities “are patriotic in the extreme,” having committed “to all war activities.” Carson’s words were shaped by his personal connection to the AFPH. He was an honorary member of the organization and knew one of the national vice presidents well, both hailing from Canton, Ohio.21
Committee on Labor member Richard J. Welch (R-CA) argued that the investigation would focus on “the human rights of physically handicapped individuals” and that Congress “should give them fair consideration.” Representative Kelley, who would chair the committee, said that Congress confronted “an astonishing lack of knowledge” on the problems that contributed to the unemployment of people with disabilities. Without an investigation, he maintained, Congress would not have the information necessary “to deal with the problem.” Beyond the question of rights, members of the House repeatedly referenced labor shortages and the need to assist disabled veterans, as Jennings Randolph (D-WV) phrased it, “fit themselves into our peacetime day-by-day economy.”22
The House Committee on Labor established a subcommittee to conduct the investigation, which lasted from August 1944 until June 1946. In 1944, Randolph, Welch, Thomas E. Scanlon (D-PA), Stephen A. Day (R-IL), and Joseph Clark Baldwin (R-NY) formed the subcommittee with Kelley serving as the chair. After the 1944 election, the subcommittee grew to seven members, and Ellis E. Patterson (D-CA), William J. Green, Jr. (D-PA), and Sherman Adams (R-NH) replaced Scanlon and Day. The subcommittee conducted twenty-five hearings, focusing on aid to amputees; blind, deaf, and “spastic” individuals; as well as people with poliomyelitis, tuberculosis, orthopedic disabilities, cancer, and epilepsy. The hearings examined conditions in New York City, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Philadelphia and studied disability through the lenses of accident prevention, monopolies and advertising, international activities, Library of Congress programs, drug addiction, employment, federal aid, rural conditions, coordination of federal programs, federal employment for blind individuals, and maternal and child health. The subcommittee also held hearings on the AFPH’s proposed federal agency.23
When Personal Became Political
Through the AFPH, the mosaic of members’ individual struggles to access health care, education, rehabilitation services, employment, and a broad range of physical spaces formed a broader picture of state and social failures. Members who lacked familial or community support existed on the margins of society and faced the threat of being placed in institutions. All these factors led to chronic fears, and regular experiences, of economic insecurity. By demanding a federal investigation and sharing their stories, members transformed their personal experiences of discrimination, exclusion, and frustration with a lack of services into a collective, political statement.
Civilian rehabilitation policy was central to the critique offered by AFPH members. In many ways, it came to represent a broad range of social and economic problems people with disabilities often faced and the failures of government policy to address these issues. Like many AFPH members, McMahon had been deemed a poor candidate for rehabilitation because his disability was too severe when he sought assistance in the 1920s. His own experiences, and those of other disabled members of the Buffalo community, many of whom worked with or for him at Handicapped Persons Industries, Inc., led him to conclude, “Entirely too many physically handicapped individuals are being considered not feasible for rehabilitation.” One of his secretaries, who had “a progressive paralysis,” had been denied rehabilitation, and when the counselor who had rejected her visited her home a year later, he did not believe her mother’s report that she was working. Like his secretary, more than half McMahon’s employees had been refused rehabilitation. Through his own business and connections in the community, McMahon tried to demonstrate that the rehabilitation program rejected many people who could be successful workers. He hired thirty-three workers with disabilities and placed another fifteen with other firms in just one year.24
AFPH member Edith Povar of Dorchester, Massachusetts, wrote to Strachan, asking him to share her experience with rehabilitation with the subcommittee. She concluded that the program was all “politics and red tape.” Povar wrote, “They said I had the mental ability to hold a position but because I was a spastic they could not help me.” Having a form of cerebral palsy, despite being “able to get about well” and not having impaired speech, meant that rehabilitation counselors deemed her not feasible for the program.25 Warren D. Wright of Rockwell City, Iowa, had a similar experience of being too “seriously handicapped” for rehabilitation. He wrote the subcommittee that “for every person they are able to help in any way, there are many more for whom they can do nothing.” In rehabilitation, Wright saw a stymied path to the opportunities “most of us are interested in—to be able to be more independent from our family, and to work out some method of making our own living, not to mention medical aid, or better health.”26
Beyond the rejections, McMahon complained that rehabilitation officials in Buffalo refused to work with other agencies and were out of touch with the realities people with disabilities faced in the community. McMahon reported being “astounded” by a wartime press release from the head of the Buffalo rehabilitation office, which claimed that, if one thousand disabled individuals came to the office for rehabilitation the next day, he could place them in jobs. For McMahon, the announcement was startling because the Erie County Welfare Council and the Employment Service had a backlog of disabled job seekers and the rehabilitation director had not taken “the time to call either one of these other two agencies.” Further, he claimed that the rehabilitation program directly undermined the work of the Employment Service as some employers had been led to believe that they should not hire disabled individuals through the Employment Service unless the rehabilitation program approved the applicant.27
Other AFPH members complained about the “superior and patronizing attitude” of rehabilitation counselors, who, they believed, understood little about the labor market, job training, or job placement. “There is a tendency,” Margaret Nickerson Martin argued, “of certain groups working with handicapped people to feel that their exposure to the upper brackets of learning, their attainment of certain educational set standards, entitles them to a private halo, which they wear very straight upon their heads.” J. A. Strohmeyer, a national vice president and leader in the AFPH in Chicago, suggested that the individuals involved in the rehabilitation program were “more interested in gratuities and cheap publicity for themselves than for common-sense aid to the physically handicapped.”28
Rehabilitation counselors made judgments about the possibilities and fitness of the individual to work. Rejection meant that the counselor deemed the individual unfit for work and that reasonable educational, medical, and vocational help would not make the person employable. The gap between the number of cases registered and the number of individuals rehabilitated was wide. In 1944, the first year of the investigation, the civilian rehabilitation program registered 269,960 cases but rehabilitated only 43,997 persons, only 16 percent of those who applied.29 These figures indicate, at least in part, that the very agency charged with preparing and placing people with disabilities in employment found employment potential in only a small percentage of the disabled individuals it encountered.
Rejection meant that the sole federal agency that served disabled people’s interests had deemed them unemployable, cutting them off from the resources that might have improved their employability and access to social resources and civic life. Rejection from rehabilitation equaled rejection from the opportunity to secure the full rights and benefits of citizenship, let alone any